Arctic College announces law program start date, applications being accepted

Nearly a decade after graduating its last cohort of lawyers, Nunavut Arctic College has announced that it is accepting applications for a long-anticipated law program to be offered in partnership with the University of Saskatchewan. The program is due to launch in Fall 2017 and will have seats for 25 students. “I look forward to the first intake of students into the law program in the fall of 2017,” commented Nunavut Minister of Education Paul Quassa. CBC reports that the program will "place emphasis on the development of skills in research, writing, analysis and negotiation,” and that it plans to include courses about Indigenous legal traditions and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. Paul Okalik, who was the only Inuk lawyer in the territory at Nunavut’s inception, noted that “we are supposed to be a trilingual jurisdiction, and we can't even write our laws in Inuktitut because we don't have Inuktitut-speaking lawyers to assist us in drafting.” CBC