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Chapter 3: University Legal Education Begins

UBC Law Curriculum, 1919 to 1945

During the inter-war years Angus and Boggs taught a number of courses that would have enhanced the curriculum of any reputable Canadian, British, or American law faculty. In 1920–1921, for example, the department of economics, sociology, and political science offered two courses in the "government" category, which were similar to courses on offer in most respectable law schools at the time. The first, constitutional government, was described in the university calendar as being concerned with "the nature and origin of the state; with its development and with the machinery and methods of government in the British Empire, the United States, France and Germany". The assigned books for this three-hour course were Leacock’s Elements of Political Science, in combination with the more classically legal Common Sense in Law by Vinogradoff.

The only other course taught as part of the curriculum in "government" fell four-square within the "legal" realm. Studies in jurisprudence and constitutional law were organized as two half courses. The first, dealing with "the nature and origin of Law and the development of legal systems", was taught through Salmond’s Jurisprudence, or Theory of the Law. The second component of the course dealt with "the constitutional law of Great Britain and of Canada, special attention being given to the relation of the citizen to the government and to the extent to which individual liberty is recognized and protected". This was taught through Houston’s Constitutional Documents of Canada.

The following academic year (1921–1922) saw some refinement in these offerings. A two credit-hour jurisprudence course on the nature and origin of law and the development of legal systems was developed, making use of the Salmond and Vinogradoff books. By the 1922–1923 academic year, a new three-hour course providing an "Introduction to the Study of Law" was introduced by Professor Angus and provided a rapid survey of legal history in combination with an outline of jurisprudence. Jenk’s A Short History of English Law and the books by Salmond and Vinogradoff formed the mainstay of the reading material for this course, which, with some variations in required readings, was taught continuously from 1922 through to the 1945–1946 academic year. Professor Angus taught the course throughout, with the exception of a period during the Second World War when Brockelbank and Farris filled in. In addition to these courses—which would have been central to any credible programme of legal qualification in their day—the University of British Columbia offered a number of courses dealing with the legal regulation of the economy, international law, international trade, and labour relations, which likely had significant legal content.

It is of course no easier to identify a "law course" in the abstract than it is to define "law"—a question that even the great jurisprudential scholar H. L. A. Hart declined to pursue because of the conceptual difficulties presented. That said, Angus and his colleagues at the university did in fact engage an impressive amount of law teaching in this period. By any definition, a number of law courses were taught as part of the undergraduate curriculum at the University of British Columbia from the time of the First World War on. University calendars reveal the following:

Over and above these courses—impressive though the list is—one suspects that many other courses on the university calendar would have dealt with legal issues more or less directly. "Principles of Sociology", for example, is described in the 1920–1921 arts calendar as covering a range of topics including "industrial organization", "marriage and the family", "rights", "the social problems of modern society growing out of destitution, crime, overcrowding, etc." and a "survey of schemes for betterment". Similarly, the 1938–1939 calendar records that "Social Science I" offered a potentially "legal" aspect in its investigation of "institutional origins" and "the political and economic institutions of the world today"; "Principles of Economics" included coverage of "money and banking, international trade, tariffs, monopoly, taxation, . . . the control of railways and trusts, etc."; and "Government Finance" included "principles and methods of taxation". Beyond these courses, "Labour Problems and Social Reform", "Money and Banking", or "International Trade" may have had a substantial legal content.

By any standards, however, the University of British Columbia did provide a fairly extensive exposure to law and legal issues to undergraduate students during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. A comparison with the offerings of the University of Manitoba law faculty in its golden era (when it was probably the finest in Canada according to both the chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s committee on Legal Education and the Carnegie Foundation) or with the Canadian Bar Association’s "standard curriculum" reveals that undergraduate education about law at the University of British Columbia rivalled, in many respects, the best "professional" education programmes of the day.

Admittedly, this comparison does take some necessary liberties. It assumes, for example, that a general course in commercial law might provide meaningful coverage of a range of distinct "professional" topics, including contracts, agency, and negotiable instruments. No sensible observer in the 1990s would even momentarily mistake a business school’s potted undergraduate survey of business law for the panoply of private law offerings that all credible law schools provide. The comparison may be considerably less strained in the 1920s and 1930s, however. Recall that during this period full-time legal education was rare, many aspiring lawyers had no experience of further education, and classes were often arranged on a more or less ad hoc basis to suit the timetable of part-time lecturers (some of whom may have merely read from published textbooks). Even at its best, the Vancouver Law School could offer only a truncated exposure to systematic instruction. George Curtis, who in 1945 became the founding dean of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, spoke highly of the Vancouver Law School but noted that "there were only ten or twelve lectures in Contracts and so forth. That’s the most they could do." During this period, then, mere fractions of a university course might have offered as much learning as "professional school" lectures in any single subject. The lack of any identifiable or uniform standards at Canada’s part-time law schools renders the comparison far more reasonable than would be the case today.

It is interesting too to compare the programme in law teaching that developed at the University of British Columbia during the 1920s with the programme put in place at the University of Toronto in the same period. Inter-war Toronto too had its own undergraduate arts department, a lawyer engaged in arts teaching, and a number of "law" courses available to the non-specialist undergraduate student. A 1923 report On the Suggested Establishment of a Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia said the following about the University of Toronto programme:

At Toronto University certain Law courses are offered as a part of the work in the Faculty of Arts. These are for the most part of an academic character and include: History of English Law, Roman Law, Jurisprudence, Federal Constitutional Law (comparative), English Constitutional Law, Colonial Constitutional Law, International Law, and two general courses on Commercial Law.

The University of British Columbia in the same period taught, coincidentally, history of English law (as part of "Introduction to the Study of Law"), jurisprudence, constitutional law, international law, and general courses on commercial law. Toronto’s programme, however, blossomed into a much-celebrated department of law under the direction of W. P. M. Kennedy while law teaching at the University of British Columbia developed more modestly, never taking shape as a free-standing academic unit.

The University of British Columbia’s impressive combination of faculty competence, curriculum, and interest might, in other circumstances, have given birth to an undergraduate department of law (as happened not only at the University of Toronto in the same period but also at Carleton University four decades later), or it may have formed the nucleus of a faculty of law simultaneously capable of pursuing the academic goals of a university and the training needs of a profession (after the fashion of the University of Saskatchewan College of Law). Neither of these transformations in fact took place, likely because of the extraordinary complications surrounding the University of British Columbia’s birth and the quick succession of economic depression and war that hit the province in the third and fourth decades of the century. On several occasions, a full-blown university legal education seemed tantalizingly near in British Columbia, only to slip away as economic crisis or war conspired to defer the possibility.

It is possible too that Angus along with Boggs or others at the university rejected the idea of forming an undergraduate department of law for reasons of principle. Canada, in the inter-war period, had not yet opted decisively for either post-graduate legal education (the developing American norm), nor for undergraduate university legal education (after the fashion of Oxford, Cambridge, or other English universities). The fiery critic of Ontario’s Benchers, Cecil (Caesar) A. Wright, strongly opposed the direction in which W. P. M. Kennedy pulled his University of Toronto "Department of Law" during the 1930s despite his own passionate commitment to university legal education. In private correspondence (reproduced in C. Ian Kyer and Jerome E. Bickenbach’s outstanding 1987 book on legal education, The Fiercest Debate), Wright expressed the fear that Kennedy’s initiatives to create an undergraduate department of law would introduce a "bastard" system of legal education:

I think you know my own personal views regarding University Law Schools. I am quite convinced a University is the proper place. I am equally sure that its place should be after and not concurrent with an Arts course. What I do fear, is that we may be shoved into the same position as England if K. gets his way. I think that is bad, because our conditions here are so different. After all, the largest part of our law school work consists in doing what the English barrister does for some years as a junior in chambers. We have not got that. To take the English system without it, seems to me even a further retrogression than we have as yet had.

Although Angus seems to have avoided the destructive vortex that developed around inter-war Toronto’s parochial debates on legal education, he probably shared the view that Canadian professional legal training should follow rather than displace a rounded Arts education. Certainly, he rebuffed a law society invitation to merge the two during the Second World War precisely because he thought it undesirable to "cut down the amount of general education to make room for professional subjects".

Chapter 3 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