UBC Law: History

Chapter 3: University Legal Education Begins

Legal Education at the University of British Columbia, 1920 to 1945

IT IS NOT WIDELY APPRECIATED that the original plans for a University in British Columbia envisioned the development of a law department, nor that significant law teaching in fact took place in the university throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As early as 1877, John Jessop, provincial superintendent of education, called for the creation of a university to train students in "arts, law, and science". Provincial legislation of 1891 had contemplated the development of a faculty of law and, when the University of British Columbia was eventually launched under President Frank Fairchild Wesbrook two decades later, the provincial minister of education invited architects from across Canada to draw up plans for a full-service university that would include space to teach law. As late as February 1914, President Wesbrook sketched his own plans for a grand campus in which "Arts, theology, law and commerce are brought in touch and yet not divorced from the sciences". The president told one correspondent that he hoped to begin teaching in a "College of Law" some time after the 1915 academic year. He did not then appreciate, of course, the awful turning point in human history that was to be marked by the assassination of a European aristocrat in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. During the pre-war period the official publication of Vancouver articled students, the Vancouver Law Students’ Annual, reported optimistically on the possibility and likelihood of eventual affiliation of a professional law school with the University of British Columbia.

If British Columbia, like Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, had at this time enjoyed the reality of a well-established provincial university, then it might well have joined the other western provinces in developing a full university law faculty in the second decade of this century. Such ideas were clearly in the air in British Columbia as much as elsewhere in Canada. The sort of hybrid school that was envisaged, one that would be neither entirely of the university nor a mere creature of the organized profession, was more akin to that which was subsequently brought into being in Manitoba than to professional education programmes elsewhere in Canada: it was planned neither in the Dalhousie mould (university controlled) nor as a mere imitation of the Toronto Law School (later called "Osgoode Hall Law School"), which at the time was entirely managed and controlled by the organized legal profession. Although the Manitoba Law School failed substantially after a brief, meteoric moment of glory, British Columbia professional legal education in the inter-war years would probably have benefited considerably from any affiliation with the university.

Such a connection, however, was not the case. Wesbrook’s ambitions for the University of British Columbia were frustrated as the combined exigencies of war and provincial fiscal crisis took their toll. Plans for a professional school of law housed within a university died with the First World War, and were not revived for a further thirty years.

President Wesbrook plans his university, 1914.

It would be a mistake to assume that the "department of law" referred to in early planning for the University of British Columbia would have borne a strong resemblance to modern law schools. British Columbia elite culture of the period assumed that all responsible citizens would want to know about the common law and, conversely, that all good lawyers would wish to be fully cultured gentlemen and ladies. Law was not then conceived of as a narrow technical speciality of interest only to individuals seeking to make a living from the trade in services. It was, rather, a fully integrated aspect of cultural flourishing that fit precisely the definition of the "cultural stage" of education provided by Paul Klapper and quoted in the 1923 Preliminary Survey of Higher Commercial Education Made by the Associated Boards of Trade of British Columbia:

The final stage, the cultural stage, is reached when the educator determines that the field in question is so much part of the general civilization or intellectual wealth of the world that it ought to receive some consideration, not only by specialists in the field but also by the students pursuing a well-planned course of a general non-technical character designed to enable him to appreciate and play some role in the world in which he lives.

The division between law and the arts had not yet been rent.

Chapter 3 continued