TWU’s proponents might well allege that such a campaign would amount to discrimination against religious Christians, but they’d be wrong. Rather than file suit, they should ask firms to promise not to hire graduates from law schools that discriminate against anyone, including LGBT people. Those who believe that the proposed school would harm the legal profession should look, instead, to the profession itself - not to courts, but to law firms. TWU’s opponents are planning a court challenge - a strategy that, in the short term, will likely do more to raise the profile of a few Toronto lawyers than actually prevent TWU’s law school from opening. government declined to intercede against TWU’s application. This week, both the Federation of Law Societies and the B.C. Article content Rather than file suit, TWU’s opponents should ask firms to promise not to hire graduates from law schools that discriminate against anyone, including LGBT people This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. If Christian evangelicals don’t feel at home at Canada’s existing law schools, then that’s a reason to change those schools, not create a new one. religious freedom, for example - and every law school has the same obligation to make all of its students, whatever their backgrounds and beliefs, feel welcomed and respected. LGBT students and Christian evangelicals should be at the same seminar table to discuss the conflicts of rights that shape our society - equality rights vs.
TWU would create a ghetto for orthodox Christian law students, who ought to be represented at every law school in Canada for the same reason that gays should be widely represented. Nor will TWU’s students be the only ones harmed. In Canada, in 2013, no law school can possibly prepare its students to be lawyers without a diverse student body. Those values are indispensible to the practice of law, and they can’t be learned from books. Those “general principles of ethics and professionalism” ought to encompass a lawyer’s ability to work with colleagues and clients whose backgrounds, beliefs, and identities differ from her own. Substantive legal knowledge is one of those competencies, but so is “familiarity with the general principles of ethics and professionalism applying to the practice of law in Canada.” The national requirement describes “the knowledge and skills competencies” that law school graduates must possess. In approving TWU’s proposal, the Federation of Law Societies found that it satisfied the “national requirement” for entry to bar admission programs in Canada’s common-law jurisdictions. But another purpose of law school is to prepare people to be lawyers, a task that has more to do with socializing students into the legal profession than with teaching them the specifics of the law. Sure, law students have to study statutes, regulations, and court decisions in order to pass their exams. The law itself is not the most important thing that a student learns in law school.
TWU’s opponents are right that it isn’t in the public interest to approve a law school that discriminates against LGBT people, just as it wouldn’t be in the public interest to approve a law school that discriminated against black people, or Jews - or Christian evangelicals, for that matter.īut there’s a more important reason to reject TWU’s proposal, one that its detractors have largely ignored: A law school that excludes gays can’t competently train lawyers. government and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada had a chance to stop it. TWU isn’t the first religious institution to impose anti-gay discrimination under a clerical collar. (Before you ask: No, you can’t ban gay sex without effectively banning gays.) But it does require its students to sign a “Community Covenant,” promising not to get drunk, watch porn, or engage in “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.” Trinity Western is a Christian institution in Langley, B.C.