I have been accepted to Columbia (US$35,000 fee waiver), Michigan (Grotius Fellowship recipient), Toronto (full fee waiver) and Cambridge (financial aid TBC).

I would appreciate suggestions. My gut instinct is to go with Columbia.

What areas of law are you interested in? And how much of an issue is money? Columbia is a great school, but NYC is expensive. You can live reasonably cheaply in Toronto and Michigan, but the law schools there don't have the same cachet. Personally, I'd choose all three North American schools over Cambridge: the legal formalism that permeates the academic departments in Britain can't compete, in my opinion, with the more theoretical and inter-disciplinary scholarship coming out of North America. Of course, others may not share my view. Ultimately though, whichever school you choose, you can't go wrong, as they're all exceptional. You're spoiled for choice.

Very well put by the previous poster. Britain is very positivist. North America is heralding a revolution in interdisciplinary work-- U of T, CLS and U Mich are at the forefront of it. Its the coming wave in learning of the law. Britain's higher education has not been slow on the uptake in that respect.

hello there,

i am now still waiting for the grotius fellowship for 2011/2012 academic year. I see that you got one last year, congrats! may i know the amount you received and the typical amount they give? thanks a bunch

I'd definitely cross UoT and Mich off my list. These two can't possibly compete with Cambridge and CLS. It's unfair to even try to compare them.
I'm at Camb atm, so you might wanna take that as a grain of salt to my advice, but my experience (as that of so many others) is that reputation is one of the main factors when it comes to an LLM. CLS and Cambridge are simply way superior in this respect. The US equivalent to Oxbridge in the US would probably be Harvard/Yale, especially as far as admission standards are concerned.

To crystalize Dutchman's grain of salt: I went to UofT, CLS and Oxford and did not find an appreciable difference between the quality of students or instructors. Reputation, of course, is another matter entirely.

Best of luck,

Paddy