It is my first week of my last term finishing my master’s, and I am sitting in an administrative law lecture. I did not expect it to change the way I think about my own career.
I was raised in Ontario. In 2020, I left Canada to study law in the United Kingdom, in the country where the common law tradition shared by both nations originated. I wanted to build a cross-jurisdictional practice that a single domestic education might not offer, to be the kind of lawyer who could serve clients whose work does not stop at a border. International businesses, cross-border transactions, clients navigating multiple legal systems: they need counsel who can think past the boundaries of one country’s framework. That was a deliberate choice.
What I came back with was a starting point. I had heard classmates mention something called the National Committee on Accreditation (NCA) before they left, and I knew enough to come home and search for it. That was the extent of my roadmap.
What I did not have any roadmap for was what my professor said midway through that first week: the legal market carried a perception, one he had watched cause real damage, that Canadian students who study abroad do so because they could not get into a Canadian law school.
I sat with that for a while. He was not wrong about the perception. He was, however, only telling half the story.