UBC Law: History

Chapter 1: Indentured Labour

Studying and Examination

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that no learning took place during a lawyer’s articling years. A world of difference separates the uneducated from the self-educated. Many British Columbia articling students of the early twentieth century understood that they were to make the fullest possible use of their time in order to educate themselves adequately for the career that they intended to pursue, fired by both moral imperative and, simply, long-term self-interest. Judge James Moses Coady, who was called to the Bar in 1916, was aware of the laxity surrounding legal credentialling in early twentieth century British Columbia, but reminded an interviewer in 1979:

A great number of the lawyers in Vancouver in the early days were English lawyers and Ontario lawyers. Some from Manitoba—not many. Most of these lawyers had gone through and taken their course—the Ontario lawyers were Osgoode Hall men, I presume. They had gone to law school. But our British Columbia lawyers who came into the picture, they were all men who articled—served under articles and called to the Bar, went into practice, not so well qualified. If a man was ambitious enough, student enough, to study and read, not only the textbooks but to read the volume of literature that’s available to you on legal subjects, he could be as well qualified as those who took a course at the university here after a law school was established.

Self-education was also to some extent forced upon articling students by a provincial law society that examined candidates for admission not once, but several times. The matter of these examinations was of no small importance for, unlike the situation prevailing in much of the United States, no one could work as a lawyer in British Columbia without being a member of the law society. In addition, preliminary examinations evaluated the general education of "Candidates for Admission upon the Roll as Students-at-Law" (A. B. Russ, writing in 1953, described these examinations as requiring the "earnest student" to strive "through Horace’s rapturous verses to his remote, beloved Lalage—‘Child of the Sea, on tawny beaches prone’—as a prelude and preparation for the study of Byles on Bills"). Robert Wootton reported that at the time of his articles from 1918 to 1923, the law society administered "three examinations. There was the first intermediate, the second intermediate and the final."

Many students seem to have taken these examinations quite seriously, putting considerable time and effort into preparation. Wootton, for example, reported that in addition to working "a full day at the office and, indeed a full week because we carried on at the office until one o’clock on Saturdays" a typical articling student of his era "was the studier of textbooks. . . . the textbook was the source of our training." Given the length of the work week, studying took place at night. Cyril G. Beeston, who articled in Nelson and Victoria before his 1914 call to the Bar, recalled that in those days "[o]ne simply worked all day in the law office and then went home and studied". Wootton reported similarly of his Victoria articles a few years later:

I do not know what others did, but at night I usually had my supper and then read something until twelve midnight or two in the morning and I would read in that fashion for about three weeks. By the end of which I could not absorb one item of what I was reading and would then take a break of a couple of nights and then start again because my mind was freshened by the break. That was done—that was, I suppose, the average method of the average student at law of my day.

Chief Justice Nemetz observed that his seniors at the Bar, the men and women who qualified before even law society lectures were offered, learned what they had to "just by rote and by hard work". A fortunate few may have gained a quality education: "some of them would have good education . . . I mean . . . Claude McAlpine had a degree from Harvard, Senator [Wallace] Farris had been to Pennsylvania". These lawyers were the exception, however. "Rote and hard work" aptly captures the spirit of early twentieth century legal qualification as it was experienced by the vast majority of lawyers.

The effort put into preparing for the law society examinations suggests that they were rigorous, demanding exercises despite the absence of a well developed educational programme. Robert Wootton compared his own professional examinations with what he knew of university education in the 1970s. "The intermediate examination," he thought, "was just as serious a business for the student of those days as examinations are at universities and other places of learning today." Indeed, present-day students would protest with heartfelt righteous indignation if faced with an examination schedule such as that Wootton and his peers confronted:

The finals were a particular problem. In the five days of the week of the final examination, I wrote thirteen examinations spread over the period of days and when you had written thirteen examinations in five days, most of them quite difficult examinations, you really felt you had been through a week of toil.

Similarly, Oscar F. Lundell reported that his law society examinations, taken in the 1920s, were "stiff", prepared for after-hours by private study and, by that time, with the help of lectures provided at the Vancouver Law School.

Despite the light-hearted, somewhat self-effacing accounts that Alfred Watts provided of his peripatetic articles, even he in fact engaged in fairly serious study in preparation for law society examinations:

Mrs. Waters: But, to get back to the study of law. How much studying of law did you do over that adventurous summer? . . . You keep telling us how you are just scraping through things, you must have been awfully bright to get through examinations on that sort of experience.
Mr. Watts: Well, that’s the way I’ve always studied anyway. I’m afraid I’ve always been rather a loner which may or may not have been a good thing, but as far as studies are concerned I’ve always maintained that I could do a lot better if somebody would just give me the lecture notes and let me do it my own way rather than listen to lectures, probably because my powers of concentration are rather poor. I obviously had a pretty good idea of what was coming up next year by way of examination and I obviously took the required texts of one kind or another up to the Cariboo with me so that I could read them, but I must say reading about—I can’t remember really—Contracts was one, and trying to absorb Anson on Contracts without really having any explanation from anybody [was difficult and so for Equity, Real Property, and so on.]

J. W. de B. (Wallace) Farris in his law office, 1914. Even then Farris was a prominent lawyer. In later years he played a pivotal role in developing university legal education in British Columbia.

The conditions of study in the Cariboo or, for that matter during more orthodox articles in Vancouver, may have been far removed from the idealized life of quiet reflection and directed study that is associated with university education. Nonetheless a good deal of private study and exam preparation seems to have taken place. Of the Vancouver portion of his articles, Watts reports attendance at lectures but indicates that "we were supposed to pick up the rest of it on our own and what we were learning as law students. Then when it came to examinations they at least let us have the old exams and they didn’t show too much imagination about changing their questions, so that was rather helpful."

The law society’s lack of imagination in revising its examinations was a perennial complaint. Alfred Watts’s recollections of the unimaginative examining technique in the 1930s is similar to a complaint that Leon Ladner had documented two decades before while acting as an activist in the Vancouver Law Students’ Association. A letter to Oscar Bass, secretary of the law society, on February 7, 1910, outlined Ladner’s assessment of professional examination at that time:

As you will know the examination questions year after year have been repeated word for word, so that by checking up the examinations three years back a Student can, as many of them actually did, compile a concise brief of likely questions and short answers. I know one Student in particular who wrote out a small book about one-third of an inch thick of questions and answers. When all the examinations were over he explained to me that there was not one question on the whole examination which he did not have down in his brief short answers. This of course, makes the whole examination system a feat of memory instead of a test of the Student’s intellectual capacity. I know as a matter of fact that the examination system carried on here is ridiculed in the East.
. . . [t]he examination system should be changed by varying the questions although touching on the same sphere of work but not making the examinations one bit harder nor restricting the passing of one additional Student, but so changing the style of the questions that as among the Students themselves who were writing, a man who had a thorough and comprehensive grasp of a subject would have a fair chance against another who had merely performed a feat of memory.

The examination process as perceived by students at Victoria College during the 1920s.

Surely the examinations were more serious and demanded a greater level of preparation than this letter might suggest. Some students from this era admit to having put a great deal of effort into studying. Chief Justice Nemetz was critical of the examinations that he faced in the 1930s because "they were principally oriented to practical, legal practice. . . . Unless you had wealth and ability to get to other institutions, you really had defective education." Nonetheless, the examinations had to be taken seriously on their own terms. Chief Justice Nemetz told Professor Peter Burns during a 1995 interview that he "used to study" with a colleague, to "swot up for our examinations which came regularly, yearly". E. A. Lucas, who qualified two decades before Chief Justice Nemetz, might have been told only "to get Indermaur on Common Law and read it" in order to prepare for what he called "the hardy perennial questions" of the first intermediate examination, but nonetheless studied so hard that he "had whole passages practically letter-perfect". Mr. Justice McFarlane recounted that the examinations he faced at the beginning of the Great Depression "were for real. We worked hard. . . . I think I wrote eight examinations in five days." "Rote" learning this may have been. A pro forma matter it was not.

Even individuals who had benefited from a very fine full-time legal education could not afford to treat law society examinations casually. John Graham (Jack) Ruttan, who graduated from Oxford University in 1936, returned to British Columbia "immediately . . . to write . . . my final Bar exams . . . as quickly as I could before I forgot the little bit of law I had learned at Oxford". An English legal education could not of course be expected to prepare students for examination on local statutes or British Columbia practice and procedure. So Ruttan prudently deferred examination in these subjects until January of the following year, again suggesting that reasonably rigorous examinations confronted him.

Early Twentieth Century Articles

Firsthand accounts of the qualifying process required of the British Columbia legal profession in the early twentieth century lead to three conclusions. First, the articling experience was tremendously diverse, varying according to location, economic circumstances, office technology, the character of individual law practices, and the personalities of students and articling principals. Second, many lawyers who qualified in this period have recorded positive recollections both of their articling experience and of what they learned during it; at its best, the old articling system provided a rich hands-on training. Third, the earlier system of training was not just a matter of putting in time at an office, but formal knowledge did have to be garnered and demanding examinations were imposed to ensure that the book-learning deemed necessary at the time was indeed acquired.

Nevertheless, the structure of early twentieth century professional qualification had serious problems. Even extensive exposure to the workaday world of law combined with demanding professional examinations fell far short of the evolving expectations of professional education that were in their ascendancy in early twentieth century Canada. Voices within the legal profession soon began to register demands for the development of more elaborate, formalized structures of professional qualification in the province.

Chapter 2