Quebec Legal Education Since 1945: Cultural Paradoxes and Traditional Ambiguities

Some remarkable things have occurred in Quebec legal education over the last forty years. All phases of the educational process have been the object of an official government enquiry (as a consequence of widespread student discontent that led to street demonstrations); a major sociological and futuristic study of the profession and of university studies has attempted to stimulate a major shift in the intellectual orientations of legal education to ready us for the year 2000; the loss by the Quebec legal professions of lawyers and notaries of substantial power to the profit of a government agency regulating all professions in the province opens up the prospect of a major new impact on the nature of legal training; the university educational network in law has grown to be the largest and yet one of the poorest, in financial terms, in Canada; and, it almost would seem, without anyone really noticing, a semi-Marxist teaching institution has been established within the otherwise highly conservative establishment that Quebec law faculties have traditionally been