Graduate program admissions

UVic Law is grounded in a commitment to experiential learning, to public policy, to environmental law, and to the resurgence of Indigenous Legal Orders - a commitment reflected in our groundbreaking joint degree program in Canadian Common Law (JD) and Indigenous Legal Orders (JID). Our world-class graduate program, which builds on this commitment, is strongly grounded in a collaborative law-and-society approach. You can learn more about that approach here.

The law and society approach is deeply interdisciplinary, which means that each student's committee would include one supervisor from outside of the law faculty. Students in our program have, for example, been co-supervised by scholars in History, Philosophy, Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Visual Arts, Indigenous Governance, Business, and more. We accept students across a wide range of subject areas and welcome engagement with Canadian, international, and comparative dimensions of the study of law.

Explore our areas of specialty and the faculty members who supervise graduate students.

LLM and PhD applicants

We currently offer research-focused graduate programs with an interdisciplinary Law and Society focus, culminating in a thesis (LLM) or dissertation (PhD) and we therefore expect strong writing and research skills, and proposals that speak to the interdisciplinary dimensions of your project, or at the very least signal the other discipline or fields of work that you hope to draw on. We encourage you to pay close attention to the strengths of our school and that you specify the faculty that you would expect to work with, and explain why.

We offer only September entries, and late applications are rarely considered. As a general rule, we also do not offer deferrals to entry dates. The online application will be available on September 1 each year for the following year, and the application deadline is December 15, 2023 for September 2024 entry.  Applicants are responsible for checking their own applications to ensure that all documents are submitted by December 15, 2023.  Late applications and applications missing required documents will not be considered. References to be submitted by December 22, 2023 - one week after the deadline.

Find out our minimum requirements and how to apply.

Still have questions? Find the answers on our Graduate Admissions FAQs page.

NOTE: Completion of our graduate degrees will not permit you to practice law in Canada. The UVic JD admissions office does consider a limited number of NCA applicants with foreign law degrees who wish to fulfill requirements of the National Committee on Accreditation.  At UVic, NCA students are only permitted to study during summer session and cannot be concurrently enrolled in our graduate programs.

Visiting research applicants

A small number of visiting research student positions are available on a rolling basis.  Applicants who are registered for a graduate program at any other institution (Canadian or international) and are interested in visiting to work with faculty for any length of time should follow the visiting research application instructions.