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For only the second time in history, Canada has qualified for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, hosted by Qatar in November later this year. However, scores of reports detailing human rights abuses suffered by migrant workers essential to the momentous event have led many to question whether a boycott is warranted. In an absence of formal legal recourse and limitations to FIFA’s liability as a non-state and non-business entity, normative approaches may be the only option to hold those at fault accountable.

As the 21st century began, the emigration of Canadian lawyers to the United States was seen as a crisis within the Canadian legal profession. Today, it is accepted as a fact of life. Yet, trends in that migration pattern have never been publicly quantified. Using data from the New York State Bar Association, LinkedIn, interviews, and archival sources, I studied the history of Canadian-trained lawyers in New York, the primary American jurisdiction of legal practice for Canadians. As I show, once opportunities opened for Canadian law students to practice in large New York law firms, their emigration largely became a function of the business cycle. Concerns about Canadian lawyers emigrating to large American law firms returned amid 2021’s white hot market, but these concerns paled in comparison to the anxiety that the Canadian legal profession once felt about Canadian brain drain. During a hiring boom in 2000, Professor Harry Arthurs wrote about the arrival of American legal employers at Canadian law schools and the moral panic that ensued over the loss of Canada’s “best and brightest.” Since then, American recruitment of Canadian lawyers has continued, but studies of that recruitment have not. To understand how the American recruitment of Canadian lawyers emerged and evolved, I examined the history of Canadians practicing in New York. This blog post briefly summarizes some of my findings.