UBC Law: History

Chapter 2: Formal Legal Instruction Begins

ALTHOUGH IT EVENTUALLY TOOK UP its educational mission with much enthusiasm, the early Law Society of British Columbia was a reluctant partner in the development of formal legal education.

During the province’s early years, most established lawyers saw little reason to change a system under which professional qualification was earned principally through apprenticeship. Despite statutory grants of power in 1884 and 1888 that conferred authority over legal education and authorized any necessary steps to improve "legal education generally" (including, importantly, the power to appoint and pay lecturers), the governing body of the law society (the "Benchers") made little use of their new powers until well into the twentieth century. Many individual Benchers no doubt thought that training by apprenticeship had served them well and genuinely saw no pressing need for change. Self-interest may have come into play too, for, as cynics may note, one practical effect of qualification by apprenticeship is to make the services of unpaid or severely underpaid para-professional workers readily available to established practitioners.

Despite this, some elite lawyers worked to create a system of formal lectures and examination in British Columbia’s early years. Such individuals were encouraged, prodded on, and nagged by articling students, who were the earliest and strongest champions of formal legal education in British Columbia, as elsewhere in Canada. As early as 1900 Oscar Bass, as an articled clerk, wrote a letter to the Benchers asking them to offer a course of lectures for law students. Although it now seems odd, law students at one time earnestly wished to attend lectures, very much wanted to learn and, indeed, sought to be subjected to the rigors of objective examination.

Ladner’s Journey and Its Aftermath

Turn-of-the-century British Columbia witnessed a remarkable professional resurgence. Bar associations of one sort or another were formed to foster self-improvement and to lobby, cajole, bully, or persuade lawyers and legislators alike of the need to take a proactive stance in developing for the first time a fully self-regulating, highly educated, and ethical legal profession. Amid all the fervour to become professional, a group of young men (and soon, women) formed the Vancouver Law Students’ Association in 1907. They immediately pressed the law society to implement a series of lectures for their benefit. Early in 1909 their president, a remarkable young man of confidence and ability, travelled from the Lower Mainland to Victoria to address the Benchers of the Law Society of British Columbia on the need for legal education. His mission was daunting: to inform a distinguished group of his professional seniors that they were not properly discharging their duties to develop the profession for which they were responsible.

Leon Ladner, who at 25 years of age was still in training to become a lawyer, implored the Benchers to develop a formal system of legal education in the province. Ladner’s April 7, 1909 "Notes on Address to Benchers" (sketched out in longhand on Empress Hotel letterhead) outline arguments in favour of taking this step. Formal education was, he thought, clearly the only sensible way to qualify for any modern profession worthy of the name. Ladner’s sparse notes indicate that he envisioned an organized law school administered by a dean and following the "principles of Osgoode + Dalhousie e.g. Board of Governors". Under the heading "Expediency of establishing law school now" he noted that no university was likely to be established for "4 yrs at least". Stressing the "Responsibility of Law Society towards training students" and the likely resulting "Efficiency of legal profession", Ladner presented financial projections showing that the costs of a law school could be met from available funds if they were topped up by a new levy of a "nominal fee on students in attendance say $20 per term". He seems to have thought that some tie-in with the proposed British Columbia University might be developed in due course. His notes cryptically indicate "University assistance later". The second page of Ladner’s speaking notes is a summary of the main points he wished to communicate to the Benchers:

Sum up points —

We ask —

Law school now organized
Pay lecturers + Dean
All students + barristers + solicitors join
University long way off
Govt favourably disposed
Financial aspect
Responsibility of legal profession towards student body
Future possibilities.

Would appreciate questions by Benchers.

According to the Vancouver Daily Province of March 17, 1909, Ladner and his peers sought the creation of "[a] provincial law school for Vancouver, which will ultimately be in affiliation with the proposed provincial university". Knowing that Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University funded and controlled the law school in that province, while Toronto had a non-university professional course fully funded, controlled, and managed by the law society, the Vancouver students sought "a combination of both": "They ask for the appointment of six lecturers with three lectures a week during six months of the year." Although plans were then being developed to create a provincial university, no such institution had yet been established. As a result the law students could not fully outline the exact relationship that might be developed between profession and academy. As an interim measure they sought a loose affiliation with Vancouver’s McGill College (a satellite campus of Montreal’s McGill University), which had agreed "to provide the society with two rooms for the lectures". The students were supported in this initiative by the Vancouver Daily Province and Victoria Colonist newspapers, Attorney-General William J. Bowser, and Premier Richard McBride, as well as by some sixty members of the legal profession who had formally endorsed "a properly organized law school".

Although this action seems thoroughly unremarkable from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Ladner’s 1909 proposal in fact represented a call for a radical departure from the status quo. His proposals tapped into a ground swell of lobbying activity by articled students across Canada, supported behind the scenes, one suspects, by some of Canada’s leading lawyers. They were also probably influenced by the rapid development of university law schools then taking place in the United States.

Despite the apparent logic of their arguments, the growing stature and influence of the young man who made them, and his powerful allies in the cause of formal legal education, British Columbia was not to see the development of a university faculty of law until after the passage of a full generation, two world wars, the Great Depression, and massive changes in the provincial economy and culture. The University of British Columbia Faculty of Law was not to be launched until 1945.

But Leon Ladner did not speak to the Benchers in vain. Developments elsewhere in Canada had their effect in British Columbia and legal education was transformed in the decades between Ladner’s presentation to the Benchers and the eventual founding of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law in at least three major areas:

the creation of professional training schools for aspiring lawyers in Vancouver and Victoria;
significant developments in the teaching of law to undergraduate arts students at the University of British Columbia; and
the entry into the legal profession of the first generation of women lawyers.

Leon J. Ladner was one among a series of early student leaders to attempt to persuade the Law Society of British Columbia to develop a law school for the benefit of articling students. A lifelong supporter of higher education, he hung this as his earliest professional "shingle", circa 1910.

In 1909, however, these developments lay in the future. For the youthful Leon Ladner it must have seemed that an eternity passed before anything came of his initiatives. Alfred Watts has aptly observed that senior lawyers "are a conservative lot" and it may well be that a combination of innate conservatism, fiscal responsibility, and uncertainty as to how to best address the concerns of a divided student constituency (Victoria and Vancouver law student associations each lobbied to have the provincial law school located in their city) slowed the development of formal legal education. (One argument deployed by Victoria law students to support bringing a provincial law school to their city rather than Vancouver was that "Victoria as the home of a proportionately greater leisure and moneyed class of people would probably furnish a relatively greater number of students than Vancouver"). Even at that, within only five years of Ladner’s address to the Benchers, British Columbia had not one but two law school programmes—the divided student body was placated in 1914 when new law schools began operations on both sides of Georgia Strait.

Chapter 2 continued