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Chapter 2: Formal Legal Instruction Begins
The Victoria Law School, 1914 to 1923
If the history of an institution such as the Vancouver Law School is sparsely documented (and it operated continuously as the principle organ of legal education in British Columbia for nearly three decades, temporary periods of abeyance in war-time aside), then the history of its sister institution in Victoria is much harder to trace. In part the absence of records is to be expected of a smaller institution that existed for a mere decade, even counting an extended dormancy during the First World War.
A 1923 report of the Canadian Bar Association committee on legal education commented that both the Vancouver Law School and the Victoria Law School were continuing operations under the direct control of the Benchers of the law society, but that only in Vancouver was there a paid part-time dean. Like its Vancouver equivalent, the Victoria Law School seems to have relied on lectures given voluntarily by members of the local legal profession. One might surmise that the Victoria Law School would as a result have suffered similarly from uninspired pedagogy and limited curriculum. However, insufficient evidence survives to sustain any firm conclusions about the character or orientation of the school. In at least one respect the Victoria branch of professional legal education seems to have surpassed Vancouver’s equivalent, though. Robert Wootton, who started articles in Victoria in 1918, reported that, in the provincial capital, attendance at lectures was both compulsory in theory and enforced in fact:
We did, at the beginning have no lectures but later on an establishment was made whereby lectures were given by practicing barristers and we were further required to attend a sufficient number of the lectures to entitle the student to write an examination. . . . I was articled to my Father in 1918—in November. I have before me this certificate which I will read, "We Hereby Certify that Robert Alexander Wootton has attended a sufficient number of lectures to entitle him to write on the first intermediate examination in December next and that he has paid his fees for such lectures. Dated at Victoria, B.C., this 25th Day of November, 1920." So you will see that I had lectures. Later on the certificate read, not "sufficient number" but the actual number attended because perhaps the certificate had then been given as to a sufficient number when the fellow hadn’t attended any. But I have a form here which indicates as to my intermediate lectures that I had attended 61 out of 75 lectures and therefore was entitled to write the second intermediate examination.
In Retrospect
Like Toronto’s long-established Osgoode Hall Law School or the newer Wetmore Hall in Regina, the two British Columbia law schools were organized, structured, and maintained by the legal profession. The Vancouver Law School and the Victoria Law School closed in 1915 as the seriousness of the Great War became apparent, reopening following the cessation of hostilities in 1919. Although the Victoria school had a short life-span, closing permanently in 1923, the Vancouver institution survived until 1943, when another long and devastating war again forced its closure. What rose from the ashes on that occasion was not a revived professional school but the much more ambitious undertaking of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. That new model derived much from Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia legal culture, and also from the fine traditions of legal learning associated with Prairie law schools, the great American universities, and Oxford.
No matter how much more ambitious British Columbia’s university law faculties have been, however, the Vancouver Law School was a thoroughly reputable programme by any reasonable standard of its time. It was no poor cousin of programmes elsewhere in Canada and, in fact, British Columbia rather closely approximated the national norm in the programmes of legal education then in place in common-law Canada. Even Ontario’s celebrated professional law school at Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto was not necessarily in an altogether different. Although many lawyers of the period have paid testimony to the value and influence of Osgoode Hall, not all were inclined to a generous appraisal of that institution. John L. Farris, who qualified for the British Columbia legal profession in the 1930s with an education at the Harvard Law School offered a blunt, critical appraisal of the Vancouver Law School’s central Canadian twin:
Osgoode Hall should never have been dignified with the name of a Law School. It was . . . you spent your time in the offices and took lectures afterwards. There was a report in the late twenties by the Carnegie Foundation on legal education in Canada and what they had to say about Osgoode Hall was just unbelievable. They said the only law school fit to be called a law school was Dalhousie.
Whatever the merits of Osgoode Hall Law School in the 1930s, a number of its students would likely have agreed.
Only Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Nova Scotia provided common-law professional training in a university setting during this period. Manitoba had developed an intellectually ambitious, full-time academic legal education in the mid-1920s but jettisoned its state-of-the-art programme entirely after only a few short years. The various reports of the Canadian Bar Association committee on legal education from 1916 through 1945 generally convey the sense that, although British Columbia may never have been at the forefront, neither was it especially deficient by any reasonable standard of the day.
In short, the Vancouver Law School deserves to be recognized for what it was: a sustained, serious professional training school—no more; no less. As important as it was in training professionals and in laying fundamental groundwork for the eventual development of modern British Columbia legal education, however, the Vancouver Law School was not the only game in town. The University of British Columbia was also involved in teaching law, from the end of the First World War on, albeit not in a programme directed toward professional qualification.
| The Victoria Law Students’ Association was a less assiduous producer of Annuals, images, and icons than its Vancouver equivalent. This illustration of their 1914 mock parliament is a rare record of their activities. |
Quick! To find out how much you know about the history of legal education in British Columbia try the following quick test: |
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Did you get the following answers?
If so, then you should be proud of your knowledge of the history of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. Unfortunately, however, these are not "gold medal" answers. In fact, you fail the test entirely. The correct answers are much less widely known than these "nearly" right responses. University legal education in British Columbia actually began not with the return of veterans from the Second World War but in the wake of the First World War. Teaching of the earliest university-level law courses took place not in a "law faculty" but in the department of economics, sociology, and political science. The responsible dean was G. E. Robinson, who administered the faculty of arts and sciences. Theodore H. Boggs, who taught jurisprudence and constitutional law with Henry F. Angus as early as 1920–1921 held a doctoral degree from Yale. Angus, who held a bachelor of arts degree from McGill, and master of arts and bachelor of civil laws (master’s equivalent) degrees from Oxford, published Citizenship in British Columbia in 1926, some thirty years before any monograph-length publication would emerge from the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. In addition to these men, who formed a sort of "core" of University of British Columbia law teaching in the early twentieth century, the faculty also enjoyed the services of Harvard law school graduate William J. Brockelbank, who served briefly as a lecturer in government in 1942–1943; of Reginald H. Tupper (Dean of the Vancouver Law School from 1938 to 1943), who served as a lecturer in commercial law from 1934 through 1943; and of Vancouver lawyer John L. Farris, who served as a lecturer in the Faculty of Commerce in 1942–1943. |
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
