UBC Law: History

Chapter 3: University Legal Education Begins

The British Columbia Anomaly

Angus’s rebuff of the law society offer raises a puzzling question about the history of British Columbia legal education: If, by 1920, both a professional school of law in Vancouver and a university department were actively engaged in the teaching of law, why did the two not merge to provide university-based intellectual training for aspiring lawyers? From our perspective seventy-five years later, a union seems both logical and practical.

In maintaining both a professional school and a university department as separate institutions during the 1920s, British Columbia was something of an anomaly in common-law Canada. Each of the three Prairie provinces had by this time developed arrangements under which individuals wishing to pursue a career in law could fulfil part of their professional qualification by registering in courses offered through the provincial university. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had long-established university law faculties by this time. Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada, Prince Edward Island and the northern territories had very small population bases, and Quebec, as a civil-law jurisdiction, structured legal qualification in its own way. Among the common-law provinces, only Ontario and British Columbia maintained a professional law school separate from the university.

Ontario can be forgiven, for its lapse at union is less clearly aberrational. By the second and third decades of this century a sort of institutional inertia surrounded the Osgoode Hall Law School, which was then both well- and long-established as an arm of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Lawyers in Ontario had no particularly strong reason to wish to radically disrupt a familiar, comfortable credentialling structure that was still looked upon as a respected model by the newer legal professions of the western provinces. The situation in British Columbia, however, was different in almost all respects: Canada’s Pacific province had no highly developed training programme, no established institutions in danger of disruption if a university law faculty was to be created, and no establishment feathers to be ruffled. The province was characterized by a social and institutional fluidity seemingly more akin to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Alberta than to "Upper Canada". Why would this new, western province turn its back on the pattern—quickly establishing itself across North America—of providing university legal education as part of professional credentialling?

It is tempting to speculate that British Columbia’s aberrational behaviour must have arisen from some principled opposition on the part of either the university or the law society to formal academic education for the legal profession. It is easy to imagine a certain sort of university scholar looking askance at any hint of practical education—resolutely defining their role in relation to teaching the classics, literature, history, and humanities rather than to professional disciplines or the sciences (cultivating "Greek roots in Ivory towers" in Depression-era parlance, according to Angus). On the other side, it is possible that influential legal practitioners who held scholarship and all things associated with the university in utter contempt may have actively opposed any role for academics in training new generations of practical men and women of law. The history of Ontario legal education has too often been characterized by misunderstanding, distrust—perhaps even bad faith—in many encounters between the world of legal practice and the world of legal ideas. The same processes might be presumed to have played themselves out in British Columbia, stymying the development of legal education until very late in the game.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The explanation of the anomaly is much more mundane. A university law faculty was not created out of law society efforts before the First World War because there was, in effect, no university with which either the Vancouver or the Victoria law schools might be affiliated. A series of accidents of timing and other unpredictable misfortunes intervened to prevent the union of the two throughout the inter-war period. Some considerable opposition to the principle of formal legal education probably played itself out behind the scenes but it was muted, kept in-house, and entirely without the pyrogenics produced in Ontario.

I would not make it compulsory to attend lectures at all—I think that lectures are no good whatever, and so far as I am concerned, I would do away with the law school in a minute, but apparently it has been decided by the Benchers to have the law school.
—J. H. Senkler, October 16, 1919

Review of the University Environment in British Columbia, 1872 to 1945

The University of British Columbia was a rather late entrant to the field of publicly funded provincial universities in Canada. After years of planning, preparation, heightened expectations, dashed hopes, and further planning and preparation, the first convocation was held in Victoria on August 21, 1912—three years before any classes were taught and a year before the new institution even had a president. In Tuum Est: A History of the University of British Columbia, Harry Logan described this convocation "as a sort of launching ceremony for the University".

The earliest known proposal to create a university in British Columbia in fact is found several decades earlier in the First Annual Report of John Jessop, superintendent of education in 1872. Jessop simply assumed that some sort of legal education would be provided: "British Columbia will soon require a Provincial University, capable of conferring degrees in Arts, Law and Medicine". So, too, the British Columbia legislature took it for granted that law had a place in university education. Logan summarized the 1890 Act Respecting the University of British Columbia as follows:

The University was to be empowered to grant degrees in Arts, Science, Medicine and Law. Courses in Arts and in Science were to be set up at once. It was laid down that the Arts course "shall embrace all the branches of a liberal education necessary for the degree of Bachelor of Arts or such degrees as may be determined on by the University council" . . . "The Science course shall include the subjects of Agriculture, Mechanics, Mining and Civil Engineering, leading to and preparatory to the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Science." While no provision was made for actual courses to be given in Medicine and Law, the University Council was authorized to "make and alter any statutes . . . touching the curriculum and examination necessary for degrees and the granting of the same," and in the meantime, subject to approval by the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council, the University might admit to examination for degrees in Medicine or Law graduates or students from approved Medical or Law Schools situated in either the Province or elsewhere.

The University of British Columbia has been a cash-strapped institution for much of its history. The "Fairview shacks", shown here in 1925, accommodated the activities of the University during its first decade.

This attempt to found a provincial university for British Columbia foundered on the rivalry between Victoria and the Lower Mainland for leadership of the new province. As a result, college-level education came to Vancouver in 1906 and to Victoria in 1908 when McGill University established satellite campuses under provincial enabling legislation passed in February 1906. By 1912, however, an energetic minister of education had carried the idea of a provincial university far enough to issue a call for architects from across Canada to compete for the design of a university campus. They were asked to submit plans for a full-service university that combined the conventional university subjects with training in a number of practical disciplines. Significantly, law was to be included.

The first president appointed to head the University of British Columbia was a Canadian physician serving as dean of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Frank Fairchild Wesbrook, appointed in February 1913, laid ambitious plans for both curriculum and the construction of a campus. Faculty were hired and a calendar was issued. The first session of instruction began in the autumn of 1915—possibly among the worst of all possible times in Canadian history to begin any new venture of this sort. Canada and the Empire were then mired in the second year of a dreadful war whose fullest horrors were yet to be revealed. The stresses of the time were immense and, not surprisingly, the ambitious plans for the development of a major provincial university were put aside. Henry Angus later noted that "the financial stringency resulting from the World War had also caused the building programme to be postponed and the one permanent building at Point Grey remained in skeleton form for many years" while the university was housed in "inconspicuous" and "temporary quarters" near the Vancouver General Hospital in buildings known as the "Fairview shacks". (So modest were these quarters on Henry Angus’s arrival in Vancouver, that, he said, "the street car conductor could not tell me where to get off ".)

President Wesbrook died shortly before the Armistice in 1918 at 50 years of age. His efforts to develop an institution he envisaged as a "provincial university without provincialism" were all but completely frustrated during his lifetime. The university for which he had nurtured grand ambitions would not enjoy security of funding until after the Second World War.

Wesbrook’s plans at all stages allowed a place for legal education. An idealistic man credited with setting "the University on a broad and liberal path from which it has never since deviated", Wesbrook outlined his sweeping vision for a provincial university in an important speech delivered during his first year in office:

Canada’s task is that of constructing a nation almost "while we wait", which must, however, be a part of that supernation upon which the sun never sets. Hers is a constructive problem. She builds anew and does not have to dwell in chaos amid the litter of tearing down whilst she rebuilds her whole national fabric. She will therefore do wisely to profit by the experiences of the older nations in order that there may be no need of the uneconomic and tragic task of reconstruction . . . .
Inevitably we shall become incapacitated from over-specialization unless we develop our "social nervous system" to the corresponding degree. . . .
The people’s university must meet all the needs of the people. We must therefore proceed with care to the erection of those workshops where we may design and fashion the tools needed in the building of a nation and from which we can survey and lay out paths of enlightenment, tunnel the mountains of ignorance and bridge the chasms of incompetence. Here we will generate currents of progress and patriotism while we prepare plans and begin the construction of a finer and better social fabric than the world has known. Having done our best to found provincial universities without provincialism, let us pray that posterity may say to us that we built even better than we knew.

President Wesbrook, who set the tone for the University of British Columbia, thought that universities had a central role to play in "nation building". Similar hopes and aspirations were held for "British Law". This cartoon portrays stereotypical British colonists (including Uncle Sam!) marching out on their own with the "Priceless Heritage" of British law tucked safely under their arms, 1938.

Education in law had an important role assigned to it in advancing this vision. Notes Wesbrook made in February 1914 while on ship returning to Canada from England sketched out a future campus in which intellectual linkages and relationships among different fields of knowledge would be crystallized in architectural form:

We have sought to relate the biological sciences to the physical sciences and arts, whilst we have them next door to agriculture, forestry, medicine and pedagogy. Mines and geology are located in the same group, as close as possible to engineering and the pure sciences foundational to them. Arts, theology, law and commerce are brought in touch and yet not divorced from the sciences. The university administration building, library, and convocation hall are centrally located. The athletic grounds, drill grounds, armoury, the site for the department of pedagogy’s practice school and the hospital-medical school sites are all on the town side of the university grounds so as to be more readily accessible to Vancouver . . . .

President Wesbrook’s assumption that the university would in the fullness of time develop a full law department was also recorded in correspondence that same year in which he explained that "[a]ctive teaching in the arts and sciences will not begin until the autumn of 1915 and it will probably be some time thereafter before a College of Law is established". Wesbrook and his contemporaries took it for granted that legal education had an important role to play in the new university.

John Oliver was a farmer and he didn’t believe in this high falutin’ stuff of education very much.
—John L. Farris, 1981

During the years of relative prosperity in the 1920s, and under the leadership of a new president, the university should have prospered. But in fact even the period between the end of the First World War and the Great Depression were difficult times for the new institution. Premier John Oliver was, to say the least, cool to the cause of higher education in British Columbia. Henry Angus recalled that, just after he had turned down the opportunity to take up a legal career in order to commit himself to the university, the "very precarious" financial situation was revealed when his own "elimination was seriously discussed as one of the necessary economies". "The future of the university was still in doubt" and would remain so for another two decades.

Timing is everything. It seems that from one decade to the next, mishap followed upon accident of timing followed upon disaster to deny British Columbia a university law faculty. The university did not exist at all in the period from 1909 through 1914 when the Law Society of British Columbia was giving active consideration to the problem of how to best educate students in law. By the time the law society’s two schools had opened and the university was launching its programme, Canada was immersed in the First World War. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the university written in 1958 by its president, Norman MacKenzie, alludes to the great difficulties the university encountered during its first thirty years:

Those who did all in their power sixty or seventy years ago to have higher education established in British Columbia could not possibly have foreseen that the new university must, of necessity, begin its lectures one year after the outbreak of the First World War. As a consequence, both staff and students had to make do with what limited "temporary" quarters were available, while during each of the wartime sessions many of their ablest colleagues and friends left for overseas service. To-day the khaki cord on the undergraduate gown has almost lost its significance for those who wear it, but it symbolizes a precious inheritance. The delay of a decade before the University was installed on its present beautiful campus had scarcely been overcome when a world depression shattered all hopes of expansion, or even of consolidation, and came near to closing the University. Again U.B.C. overcame its difficulties only to enter a longer and more pitiless world war.

A more difficult half-century can scarcely be imagined. With survival of the polity, the university, and the individual so threatened, it is not the least surprising that the merger of British Columbia’s two traditions of legal education was delayed.

Chapter 4