UBC Law: History

Chapter 4: Toward a Law Faculty

Years of Dormancy

So the matter stood for some years. Although the matter of creating a university law faculty lapsed into dormancy for a good many years, the law society decision of 1923 had not delivered a fatal blow to the idea of university legal education in the province. It may be that some serious division among the Benchers as to the most desirable method of training lawyers lurked in the background of an anti-academic decision which was justified on budgetary grounds. The Canadian Bar Association’s legal education committee, which had strongly advocated the creation of full-time university legal education in its first decade lapsed during the 1920s into sometimes acrimonious debates on the relative merits of qualification by articling, by an articling system that ran concurrently with attendance at lectures, or by full-time academic training. These debates likely also found expression within the leadership of the British Columbia law society.

Be that as it may, the Law Society of British Columbia (unlike the leaders of the organized profession in Manitoba or Ontario, for example) never formally declared itself vehemently opposed to academic legal education. The advantages of some liaison with the university for legal education were obvious and neither side wished to rupture the possibility of developing a mutually advantageous programme. It is likely that informal communications on the topic of legal education continued sporadically throughout the next decade. Elite lawyers and elite academics would, to some extent, have moved in overlapping social circles during this time, and it is likely that the topic was kept alive through many undocumented casual conversations. The matter might come up incidentally in a way that leaves historical trace. A September 4, 1928 letter from Dean R. W. Brock to E. C. Senkler, secretary of the law society, related to J. M. Jephson’s request that the university assess whether he has equivalent to second year arts standing. Dean Brock proposed to Senkler that "the University . . . examine for you in academic subjects candidates for admission as students-at-law". He continued:

This would be a feasible first step in linking up the Law School with the University, an end that I understand is desired by both your Society and the University, and that has not been consummated yet solely on account of the University not being in a position to assume the financial obligations that might be involved.

The matter took an interesting turn or two during the 1930–1931 academic year. First, by letter of October 2, 1930, Reginald Tupper provided President Klinck with a summary of his academic record, reporting that for "four years I lectured on the Law of Real Property at our local Law School". Tupper, who was a key player in many law society initiatives relating to legal education, subsequently took up a part-time appointment to the university faculty. It is certainly clear from this appointment that the university wished to maintain some profile in law teaching, at least as a valued part of general education and, also, perhaps as a stage en route to professional training. Tupper’s involvement also solidified an important link with the British Columbia legal profession and it may have been hoped that his appointment would in some way further the process that had begun in 1922.

The cash-strapped University of British Columbia, circa 1923.

Second, more formal discussions between the university and the Benchers began afresh. Late in December 1930, President Klinck responded to an enquiry from Arthur Whiteside by sending him a copy of a University of British Columbia document, The University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, which had been prepared during the previous round of discussions on the topic. Whiteside responded in turn by asking for a copy of the materials President Klinck had gathered in 1922 on law training at other Canadian universities. Fearing, perhaps, that the university might have come to think of the law society as an unreliable partner in educational matters, Whiteside assured the president that, this time around:

We are in earnest in our intention to use every effort toward the establishment of a faculty of law at the University. We believe that such a move would result in benefit to the Institution as well as to the public.
It is now necessary for any student-at-law to have his degree in Arts or in the recently instituted business course, which is really an Arts degree, and we feel that it is but a natural step for a student to proceed in his own college to acquire the standing necessary to enable him to practise law. Further, it is not anticipated that there would be so much opposition to the project on the part of the Legislature as there would have been if we had launched the proposal in the late Premier Oliver’s time.
There is a meeting of the Benchers of the Law Society on Monday next. Mr. [Lindley] Crease … and I are expected to make a report and I should like you to let me know when I can meet you before that date so that we may have a further informal discussion. Possibly I might have Mr. R. L. Reid … at the same time.

Despite Whiteside’s protests, this meeting too turned out to be a false start on the road to a British Columbia university law faculty. Division among the Benchers may have been greater than Whiteside was willing to acknowledge in his dealings with the university president—he resigned as a Bencher for reasons not disclosed by the Benchers’ minutes at their next meeting on January 5, 1931. Certainly, John Farris recalled the Benchers of this era as being hostile to the notion that a formal education in law was necessary or even desirable as preparation for a career as a lawyer. His assessment of the educational aspirations of the British Columbia Benchers in 1931 stands in stark contrast to the optimistic appraisal of Mr. Whiteside. Farris told an interviewer in 1981 that:

I know when I applied to go to law school, Harvard Law School, in 1931, he [his father, Senator J. W. de Beque Farris] was a Bencher then and the only reason that I was permitted to go to Harvard was because Dad was a Bencher and it was an act of friendship to them. Most of the then Benchers were products of Osgoode Hall. . . . So these men, they believed . . . they were hard-nosed practical men and they thought this idea of wasting your time on an academic training in law was nonsense.

Whiteside’s letter to President Klinck may have put a more optimistic gloss on the state of the Bencher’s thinking than was warranted. Even so, the timing of this new approach to the university turned out to be unfortunate on at least two counts. First, Whiteside’s influence was waning among the Benchers. Even though Arthur Whiteside was very much a central figure in promoting university legal education throughout this period—his energy, vision, and ability to pull disparate actors together in a common effort was crucial—Whiteside’s political capital within the law society was severely eroded during the course of 1931 by events that were seemingly entirely unrelated to his educational initiatives. During that year the Benchers retained him to prepare a digest of volumes 21 to 44 of the British Columbia Reports. Straightforward enough, this undertaking resulted in an unfortunate rupture between Whiteside and his fellow Benchers. Alfred Watts records simply that "difficulties" arose in the project "and the Benchers removed the material from Mr. Whiteside for the final revision, no doubt an embarrassing situation as Mr. Whiteside was himself a Bencher. Mr. J. A Bland, for so many years a mainstay in the Law Society office, and his wife, formerly Miss M. L. Ringland (called to the Bar in 1919), completed the material, the digest being published November, 1933."

The politics of small organizations being what they are, one suspects that Whiteside’s fall from grace within the law society would, on its own, have created serious problems for the projected faculty of law. Whatever difficulties arose from that source were immeasurably compounded by the general economic climate in British Columbia. As misfortune would have it, the Great Depression was powerfully building steam just as discussions between the law society and the university were resumed. The law society never fully recovered from its earlier financial debacles and, by 1929, it could not even make its usual annual contribution to the Conference of Governing Bodies. Many individual lawyers suffered severe financial problems as the Depression began to bite, and law society initiatives of all sorts went unfunded. From the law society’s perspective, this was hardly an auspicious time to launch any new initiative, even one as sensible and cost-effective as participating in the development of a university faculty of law.

Nor was the University of British Columbia in any position to pick up the fiscal slack. The university grant from the government was cut from $626,000 in 1929–1930 to a mere quarter of a million dollars in 1932–1933. Even existing operations could not be sustained. Salaries were cut (between five and twenty-three percent), programmes reduced, and faculty released. President Klinck ran into a good deal of trouble as faculty members became increasingly distrustful of his ability to manage the crisis. The resulting crisis of leadership culminated in April 1932 in a senate resolution of non-confidence in the president, passed by a large majority. Just as the implications of this striking development were being worked through, worse news came. In July 1932, a government-appointed committee, known by the name of its chair as the "Kidd committee", reported. The committee, composed of members of the local business elite who had no experience of government, had been established at the initiative of "leading industrial, business and financial organizations of the Province" to investigate matters relating to provincial finances. George Kidd and friends recommended that the university be denied any government grant whatsoever in the following year. If, as seemed likely, this would threaten the very existence of the University of British Columbia, the Kidd committee was unconcerned. In that event, they said, "the question will have to be considered whether it may not be in the best interests of higher education to close the University and rely on the proposal . . . to establish scholarships to furnish the means of attending a University elsewhere in the Dominion". While these culture vandals were ultimately held at bay long enough to see Simon F. Tolmie and his reprehensible Minister of Education, Canon Joshua Hinchliffe, replaced by the Liberal administration of T. D. Pattullo, the early 1930s were clearly no time for expansion at the University of British Columbia. Any new commitment, much less anything so ambitious as the creation of an entirely new faculty, would have been both financially foolhardy and politically disastrous.

Chapter 5