Universitd De Moncton's Common Law School: A Unique Experience

At their founding, the nine predominantly anglophone provinces of Canada adopted the English legal system patterning their legal institutions upon those of Britain and accepting English public and private law as it then existed. Quebec, on the other hand, modelled its legal system on that of France and most of the private law of Quebec is of French origin. As a result of this historical divergence, French language legal education in Canada, which has hitherto existed only in Quebec, has trained civilian lawyers who are unable to practise in other Canadian provinces. The result of the situation has been that the francophone community outside of Quebec has not had access to legal services in its own language. There are, of course, many lawyers especially in New Brunswick and Ontario who come from French-speaking families but all have received their legal education in Englishlanguage institutions and, as a consequence, find it difficult to provide legal services in the French language.