Michaluk (Hicks Morley) on Labour Law Education

    Dan Michaluk, a lawyer at the law firm of Hicks Morley in Toronto has picked up on a theme I have noted before:  the disconnect between the labour and employment law bar and the law schools in Canada.  Dan’s comment appears on SLAW today.
While the demand for well-trained lawyers in the field is high and labour and employment law practice is booming and expected to continue to do so, the law schools have been cutting the number of faculty experts in the field for years.  This is a concern to the Bar and the law firms that recruit new students.  In fact, as Dan notes in his piece, leading labour law practitioners from both the union and the management side have been working together to persuade and encourage law schools to work on rebuilding their labour and employment law faculty.  
Some recruitment committee members at law schools have commented to me in private that they don’t receive top notch applications from labour & employment specialists.  That is no doubt part of the problem.  I know when I started graduate studies, I was encouraged by some leading scholars to make sure I do not focus to narrowly on labour/employment law since few schools are hiring in that field.  So there may be a chicken-egg problem:  there aren’t enough qualified labour/employment law professors  applying to law schools, but young scholars are discouraged from specializing in the field because the law schools are rarely targeting the subject area in hiring.
Meanwhile, I just try and do my part by working to build interest among students in the field in the hopes that there is a bottom up movement.  Certainly if law students and the Bar voice concerns about how labour/employment law is being pushed aside for more and more corporate law courses, this may eventually trickle down to hiring committee priorities.