UBC Law: History

Chapter 2: Formal Legal Instruction Begins

Student Experiences at the Vancouver Law School

The transcripts of the Aural History Project directed by Maryla Waters provide a unique insight into many aspects of the history of the British Columbia legal profession. Indeed, apart from the sparse notes generated by Canadian Bar Association meetings, these aural histories constitute virtually the only surviving account of this 30-year period of formal legal education. But even this resource fails to tell us everything we would wish to know about the Vancouver Law School or the Victoria Law School and little in the way of general conclusion can be drawn from the scattered recollections of men and women who were interviewed more than half a century after their student days. While some variation is to be expected in the fine texture of individual accounts, it is significant that the overall assessments offered of the merits of the Vancouver Law School programme vary considerably.

Charles Hamilton reported an indifferent experience of formal legal education during his period of articles in Vancouver in 1924:

[T]here was supposed to be a Vancouver Law School, the Dean of which was Rex MacDonald, and when he had time, he would give us lectures and there would be, as I remember it, not more than half a dozen students who would attend at any one time. And these lectures would be given when and where it suited him in different places. There was really no organized curriculum or anything of that kind.

Similarly, Leonie (Lalonde) Anderson reported a rather informal structuring of lectures during the first incarnation of the Vancouver Law School a decade before Charles Hamilton began his years as a law student. Although she reported that "every phase in law" was taught, the curriculum was apparently informally arranged, more in response to the availability of lecturers than to any overriding pedagogic concern. Attendance was nominally compulsory for students who lived in Vancouver and New Westminster. Lalonde reported that she dutifully attended all the lectures. Her peers did not, however, assign uniformly high priority to attendance at lectures. Lalonde recorded that "[t]hey either wanted to go or they didn’t".

The overall impression conveyed by Lalonde’s recollections is very much to the effect that, in its early years at least, the Vancouver Law School marked no radical departure from the previous, ad hoc lectures that had been offered from time to time by public-spirited lawyers. Students were not given time off work for educational purposes, and teaching was restricted to the "early evening" in order to accommodate the daily ebb and flow of work at law offices. Despite all this, Lalonde’s experience of her education at the Vancouver Law School was generally positive. The lecturers, she said, were "all very good and I have no doubt that they were chosen for that purpose—that they were good lecturers".

Similarly, Alexander B. Robertson, who articled in Vancouver from 1925 to 1928, seems to have been a relatively content student of law society legal education during the inter-war years. Although the Vancouver Law School’s educational programme suffered in some respects from the lack of full-time faculty ("lectures . . . started at 4 o’clock if the lecturer happened to remember to come or wasn’t too busy at his office"), Robertson was, overall, impressed by both the stature of the lecturers and by the quality of instruction provided:

[S]ome of the lecturers were a Mr. Reginald MacDonald who was head of the Law School and he was universally called Rex . . . Mr. MacDonald lectured on Contracts. The lecturer on Real Property was Mr. R. H., or Reggie, Tupper who was a leading member of the Bar at that time and very highly respected. Judge Howay of New Westminster and one of the authors of Howay and Schofield’s History of British Columbia, was the lecturer on Personal Property. Criminal Law was lectured by R. L., or Pat, Maitland who was a very good criminal counsel and for a number of years after that was Attorney-General; and the lecturer in Evidence was Mr. J. R., or Jack, Nicholson, . . . who later among other things was Lieutenant-Governor of the Province.

Sports played an important role in professional formation, as these 1913 Vancouver Law Students’ Annual photographs of Vancouver Law Students’ hockey and basketball teams illustrate. Women students could not participate in these activities.

Angelo Branca, who also attended the Vancouver Law School in the 1920s, was similarly impressed by the quality of instruction. His class of "about eight or nine" was lectured by "real top men from various offices", who were, he said, "very generous with their time". Oscar Lundell’s recollections, too, confirm the impression that lectures of some considerable quality were well delivered by competent, committed instructors. Lundell, who qualified in 1928, told an interviewer that "the Vancouver Law School . . . wasn’t much of a law school" but, in reminiscing about the teaching faculty and the courses they taught (Rex MacDonald teaching contracts, R. H. Tupper teaching real property, Judge Howay covering personal property, R. L. Maitland taking care of civil and criminal law, Mr. Justice Aulay Morrison lecturing on equity, and J. R. Nicholson providing instruction in evidence), concluded that "the lectures were good lectures—they weren’t bad at all. I know many lecturers in the university law schools who weren’t as good as these men were."

Alfred Watts, attended the law school during the Great Depression (after his "Cariboo days"). He too was generally satisfied with the legal education offered by the "old law society school". Although teachers at the Vancouver Law School were not employed permanently or full time, Watts recalled that Dean Rex MacDonald ("a very fine chap, nice fellow") was backed up by a competent team of lecturers. Lectures were delivered in an intimate atmosphere: "The classes were quite small, there were about fifteen of us probably in the evening, or after 4.30, for about an hour’s lecture and that was really about all there was to it." Nonetheless, even the abundant good will and dedication of the Vancouver Law School instructors could not entirely overcome the limitations of the structure within which they laboured. The educational ambitions of a part-time faculty were very really constrained. "There was," according to Alfred Watts, "no attempt to do anything more than the three hours with us and we were supposed to pick up the rest of it on our own and what we were learning as law students." Watts responded to the challenge this limited schedule presented with a large dose of self-help and the support of an informal study group:

I used to . . . I studied quite a bit with Jack Sargent and then John Farris had gone to Harvard I guess and when he came back he still had to write the . . . this was for the last year . . . he had to write the final examinations that we did before he’d get called to the Bar. So we used to go and work up in John Farris’s . . . his dad had a lovely study in the old house up there . . . and we used to go up there and work together.

Many others of his generation probably prepared for examinations in similar fashion. Interviewed in 1983, Watts’s overall assessment was that "it was a school for the times, it certainly could not cope with the demands of today".

The executive of the Vancouver Law Students’ Association was known by its president’s name. This cartoon, carried in the 1911 Vancouver Law Students’ Annual, portrays the first meeting of the "Maitland Administration".

The Vancouver Law School era nevertheless produced many fine lawyers and jurists—whether by design or by happenstance. John G. (Jack) Ruttan, who himself had been educated in law at Oxford, acknowledged that the law society school benefited from the presence of at least one "marvellous" teacher (Tupper) and observed that "going through Law School in those days you had to take five years and some very good lawyers came out through that process of course". At least one lawyer who qualified in that period—and probably many, many more—thought that location had a good deal to do with the quality of the legal education obtained: Alexander Robertson thought that the old law society school had it all over modern university law faculties. Students under the old regime benefited greatly, in his view, from spending their days downtown on legal work and their evenings in the courthouse for lectures. Proximity to real-life litigation was, he thought, a great advantage. As a student, Robertson had been in the habit of dropping "into a courtroom to listen to whatever case was going on". This experience, he continued, was an important component of legal education that has since been lost:

I think that one of the differences between the training that would-be lawyers get at the Faculty of Law today and the training that those of us who went to the Vancouver Law School had is this: that we used to have to go to the Courthouse frequently to file documents and things of that kind and nearly everybody would drop in for a certain length of time to listen to what was going on in the courts and we all observed all the different counsel. The people at the Faculty of Law don’t have that opportunity and I think that this is one reason why so many of them when they come out of there hardly know how to behave in Court.

Others however have been nowhere near as positive in their evaluation of the Vancouver Law School. It is hard at this distance to determine whether the marked variations in student accounts of the school are attributable to differences in the quality of programme from year to year or simply to widely divergent student expectations. In contrast to both Leonie (Lalonde) Anderson and Alfred Watts, Donald Clark Fillmore thought rather poorly of the Vancouver Law School. "[I]t was," he remarked of the lectures of the 1930s, "poor instruction at that stage because basically all we had were people who were practising lawyers who would come about three times a week to the Courthouse and help as best they could reading from text books and that sort of thing." Formal instruction in textbook knowledge did not, in Fillmore’s opinion, come anywhere near to providing an exposure to the substance of the law of the sort needed by lawyers-in-training. He thought the programme deficient in that there was "[n]ot too much from the actual cases". Harvard’s much-vaunted "case method" of legal instruction (in which students learn the law by reading appellate court decisions rather than by learning textbook statements of law) had not yet migrated to British Columbia.

Chief Justice Nathan Nemetz also expressed the opinion that the educational regimen implemented by the Vancouver Law School fell short of what it should have been. Interviewed for the UBC Law Faculty Newsletter in 1988, he said that there was "a narrow application of talents. There was no jurisprudence, no theory. And there wasn’t the breadth of education there is today. It was geared principally to training solicitors." In 1995 he told Professor Peter Burns that, while the old system of legal education prepared students well "to do Articles of Association, Memorandums of Association, all of those things that you would need to do as a practicing solicitor", the education provided "was eminently unsatisfactory" on what he called "the theoretical side". The practical legal training of the 1930s left "a massive gap in educational philosophy and having to do with basic theories of legal studies". The advantages that he recognized in the legal education of his era—lectures by "prominent practitioners", "a highly literate" dean, teachers who "had prepared" their "lectures excellently", and hands-on practical training—did not, in the view of the former chief justice, begin to compensate for its defects: "Now the defects of the system were manifold . . . the defects were that you are really being trained to be practitioners."

Others too have reported poorly of the Vancouver Law School. Howard C. Green, who qualified for the British Columbia legal profession in 1922, recounted some early career advice he was given upon his return from military service in the First World War:

I had decided while I was overseas that I wanted to go into public life and straighten the country out. I think quite a few of us . . . got that idea, that we’d be very good candidates for giving some leadership in Canada. Anyway law seemed to me the very finest training for a career of that kind. When I came back to the Kootenays I was intent on getting into an office in Victoria and learning the practical way; not fooling around with lectures and things like that. But when I got to Vancouver a relative of mine who was a friend of G. Roy Long . . . took me over to Roy Long’s one Sunday afternoon and Roy Long said, "Now Howard don’t you fool around here, there’s no proper law school here; you’ve got your [veterans’] gratuity and you ought to go to Osgoode Hall or Dalhousie; those are the two best law schools in Canada."

Roy Long’s rather poor opinion of the Vancouver Law School was, apparently, borne out in Green’s experience. As for Long’s guidance, Green reported, "I took his advice, fortunately."

It may be that the quality of instruction at the Vancouver Law School was neither as good as Leonie (Lalonde) Anderson thought nor as thoroughly inadequate as some others reported. Lalonde had never experienced any other form of advanced education and her evaluation may suffer from a lack of any standard of comparison. Conversely, it may be that Donald Clark Fillmore was inclined to hold the Vancouver Law School to an overly high standard. He had spent a year at the Ontario Law Society’s school ("Osgoode Hall Law School") and in so doing had gained exposure to one of the finest programmes of legal education that Depression-era Canada had to offer. It is apparent that Fillmore’s critique of the British Columbia programme was in all respects heavily influenced, perhaps unfairly so, by this standard of comparison. Despite his criticisms of the Vancouver programme, Fillmore himself conceded that "it was as good as it could be" given the way "it was set up". If the school failed in his mind it was, perhaps, not failure in absolute terms, but only relative to standards of excellence met by few educational institutions of the era: "It was not a patch on what training I did get when I went to Toronto." In contrast with the Vancouver lectures (Fillmore described these as "no law school, no professional instructors at all"), Osgoode Hall was graced with the presence of first-rate, full-time faculty. He told Maryla Waters that it was "the year" in Toronto "that really educated me", and paid glowing tribute to Osgoode Hall, its faculty, and its teaching method:

Mr. Fillmore: Well, they were professional teachers. . . . There was Cecil A. Wright, was keen. He had been at Harvard quite recently before that and I think had been thoroughly drilled in the case method—which is you go to the cases, you don’t take a broad statement in a text book as gospel because it may be that in your situation it doesn’t apply. You’ve got to go to the cases themselves and read them.

Chapter 2 continued