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Chapter 2: Formal Legal Instruction Begins

The Vancouver Law School, 1914 to 1943

The Vancouver and Victoria law schools are institutions about which little is known. They emerged in a period of considerable, rapid development in Canadian legal education and, despite some initial hesitation, moved early to adopt a ground-breaking model curriculum recommended by the Canadian Bar Association at the end of the First World War. Neither law school seems to have been fully part of the remarkable flourishing of legal education that took place in common-law Canada in the 1910s and 1920s and we know little about what they actually taught, their faculty, or their procedures. No published account of either law school is available beyond a brief portion of Alfred Watts’s history of the legal profession. Archival holdings reveal that the Vancouver Law School lived a precarious existence in its early days and was not always able to provide even short courses of lectures in all the subjects on which law students were examined. Dean R. M. MacDonald provided periodic reports to the law society Benchers. The curriculum provided in 1922 to 1923 was as follows:

First Year
Real Property, R. L. Reid, 12 lectures
Torts, J. P. Hogg, 12 lectures
Contracts, The Dean, 12 lectures
Criminal Law, R. L. Maitland, 1 lecture

Second Year
Practice and Procedure, Mr. Justice Morrison, 8 lectures
Personal Property, Judge Howay, 12 lectures
Landlord and Tenant, Mr. Justice D. A. McDonald, 6 lectures
Equity, Mr. Justice Morrison, 9 lectures
Evidence, Judge Howay, 10 lectures

Final Year
Contracts, The Dean, 12 lectures
Constitutional Law, Mr. Justice Murphy, 4 lectures
Bills and Notes, Judge Howay, 7 lectures
Land Registry Act, Clarence Darling, 3 lectures
Domestic Relations, The Dean, 4 lectures

Some brief account of the Law Society of British Columbia’s two law schools is contained, interstitially, in the annual reports of the Canadian Bar Association committee on legal education. These accounts occasionally consider the state of legal education in British Columbia, and the dean of the Vancouver Law School seems to have participated in committee activities. It is clear nonetheless that the two British Columbia law schools were somewhat less ambitious undertakings than the other professional law schools or university faculties of law of the inter-war years. It is unclear whether the lack of support for the law schools resulted from a principled, ongoing commitment to the primacy of apprenticeship, individual personalities, or simply an inability to formulate ambitious plans for legal education in the absence of adequate and secure funding. Evidently R. M. MacDonald, the longest-serving dean of the Vancouver Law School and, inferentially, the Benchers who appointed him, did not share fully in the ambitious schemes for a scholarly legal education that enjoyed widespread currency elsewhere in common-law Canada.

The first reference to the Vancouver Law School in reports of the committee on legal education is found in relation to the 1918 annual meeting of the Canadian Bar Association. R. M. MacDonald, who served as dean of the Vancouver Law School from 1919 to 1936, argued that because of the degree of divergence among the provinces, there was no need to implement a uniform system of legal education across Canada. Dean MacDonald also stated his position that full-time legal education was not desirable. He favoured academic legal education taking place simultaneously with the practical training obtained through employment in a law office. The objective of legal education, Dean MacDonald told the 1920 Canadian Bar Association meeting was "to saturate the minds of the students in those elementary principles that lie at the base of all law, and upon which our ideas of freedom and justice exist". While other provinces (notably Manitoba) experimented with various models of legal education in the inter-war years, British Columbia remained relatively constant in pursuing this vision. At Canadian Bar Association meetings in 1931, Dean MacDonald reiterated his basic position that law school education should run concurrently with practical training ("so that the theory and practice come to him simultaneously"), albeit registering the concern "that where law students are paid in a law office, they come to be treated as clerks and they are apt to be limited in the office to the work in which they are most useful, the work in which they least need instruction".

In adopting each of these positions (except, perhaps, the last) Dean MacDonald endorsed a vision of legal education that had fallen out of favour with many leading lawyers in Canada during the crucial formative period from 1910 through to the 1920s. His views were certainly anomalous among the elite lawyers and legal educators who enjoyed hegemony within the early Canadian Bar Association and its committee on legal education. Much influenced by contemporary developments in the United States, many of those lawyers subscribed to a fully integrated vision of legal professionalism. This professional self-image emphasized the pivotal role of properly selected and educated lawyers in securing ongoing social integration in nations such as early twentieth century Canada, which were forcefully torn in many directions by multiple forces. In a society riven by deep fault-lines of regionalism, class antagonism, industrial unrest, political upheaval, and ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity, they sought to mould a legal profession of right-thinking moral agents whose work for individual clients would be directed so as to consistently advance the best interests of the state. The entire orientation of the committee on legal education in this period was to find ways of selecting, socializing, and educating lawyers who would ensure social integration through their selfless and community-directed approach to daily work. This ultimate goal, it was thought, would best be advanced by raising (pre-law) admission standards, implementing a more rigorous and intellectually oriented curriculum, developing full-time courses of legal education taught by full-time instructors, implementing a nationally uniform curriculum, and employing the "case method" as the predominant or sole method of instruction. Clearly, Dean MacDonald and the early Vancouver Law School stood outside the developing Canadian mainstream in most, if not all, of these ambitions. The narrower Vancouver vision of legal education, with its emphasis on practical training, seems nearer that of the Ontario law society Benchers than to legal educators or policy-makers elsewhere in common-law Canada.

The Benchers of the Law Society of British Columbia, for their part, seem to have had no strong commitment to legal education. More accurately, perhaps, the degree of dedication to either professional training in law by means of a law society school or to academic education at the university level ebbed and flowed dramatically as the personnel of the law society’s governing body changed. In 1922, for example, Dean MacDonald referred obliquely to apparent division among the Benchers on the state of legal education in the province when he told the Canadian Bar Association that:

[w]ith regard to the question of legal instruction in British Columbia, I have not very much to say; because the whole question is in a somewhat chaotic state here. For a year or two before the war there was a law school in existence, attendance at which was required of students in Vancouver, New Westminster and Victoria. . . . The Law School carried on in that manner until the war broke out, and practically every student, I am proud to say, went to the war, and as a consequence, our legal instructions in such manner have ceased. After the termination of the war the school was revived and has carried on in the same condition ever since. But those in authority are not in unity as to the advisability of continuing, and if continued, as to whether it should be continued on these lines. That whole matter is up for consideration by the Benchers.

The following year the Canadian Bar Association received a report from its committee on legal education which indicated that all had turned out well in British Columbia where "instruction in law by the Law Society, which last year was threatened with interruption, is still being given". Both the "Vancouver Law School and the Victoria Law School" were said to be "continuing operations" (an unfortunate description in that, unknown to the committee, the Victoria school was then on its deathbed).

The Benchers seem to have been uncertain about how to best handle legal education during this period. On July 3, 1922, they passed a motion resolving "that there be no appropriation for the Law Schools . . . for the coming year", but three months later approved the expenditure of six hundred dollars "for the term prior to the Christmas holidays", and a further six hundred for the period from January "up to the coming Easter holidays". The reasons for this reversal are unclear and it may or may not be relevant that two Benchers—E. P. Davis and J. H. Senkler—participated in the Benchers’ meetings that decided against supporting the two law schools, but not in the other meetings.

The Canadian Bar Association committee on legal education in 1923 also indicated that discussions had taken place between the law society and the university "regarding the establishment of a Law Faculty at the University, with the result that the University, while expressing its willingness and desire to undertake the teaching of law, has nevertheless decided that it cannot do so until the funds for the purpose have been put at its disposal".

Chapter 2 continued

Copyright © 1995 The University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. All rights reserved.
Please address questions or comments to Professor W. Wesley Pue, pue@law.ubc.ca