The University of Victoria (U of V) will be the first university in the world to offer a professional degree in Indigenous law in conjunction with a Canadian law degree, according to a press release.
Students of the four-year program will graduate with two professional degrees, one in Canadian Common Law (Juris Doctor) and one in Indigenous Legal Orders (Juris Indigenarum Doctor).
Rebecca Johnson, associate director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit at the U of V, said the program is the brain-child of John Borrows, the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous law at the university.
But, she said the vision for this program dates to 2000, when the U of V participated in running a law school in Iqaluit. She said law professors were flown in from across Canada to teach, making it the first time law has been taught in a primarily Indigenous community in the North.
But, Johnson said what they discovered is that the way conventional law was taught did not respond to the broad understanding of legal orders Inuit students had, who pushed for elders to come into the classroom and work with professors.
“That really was one of the pieces of the beginning of the dream of imagining that we could simply not incorporate a few Indigenous elders in the classroom, but we might try to imagine a law school where you could learn not only common law, and not only civil law, but also Indigenous legal orders,” she said.
In the press release, Borrows described the difference between common law and Indigenous law this way: Indigenous law looks to nature and to the land to provide principles of law and order and ways of creating peace between peoples; whereas the common law looks to old cases in libraries to decide how to act in the future.
Kanatese Horn, an Indigenous PhD student in law and legal studies at Carleton University, said his father attended law school in the 70s at McGill University where he faced a lot of push-back and racism.
“Going from the 70s where they didn’t want Native people at all in their profession and they faced a lot of obstacles, to fast-forward 40 years now where students—Indigenous and non-Indigenous students—would be learning Indigenous legal systems, it’s a profound change that goes beyond description,” he said.
Johnson said students in this program will learn everything they need to practice law in the conventional way, but also learn how to open conversations between the two legal orders about how to approach problems and cases.
“This is a chance to not only ask ‘how is Indigenous law different,’ but to actually engage with Indigenous law and what it offers as resources for thinking,” she said.
According to the press release, the B.C. government included funding for the program in their 2018 budget and the first intake of students is planned for fall 2018.
Photo by Trevor Swann
