UBC Law: History

Chapter 5: Reawakening

Opposition to University Legal Education

Opposition within the law society to the creation of a university law faculty in British Columbia was not always limited to financial niggling, greed, selfishness, or reluctance to pay higher law society fees. Some British Columbia lawyers clearly opposed the move on principle.

This sort of opposition may have originated in a carefully reasoned assessment of the skills and experience required of a lawyer or simply in the innate conservatism of middle-aged, middle-class, moderately educated journeymen lawyers. George Curtis recalled "a natural loyalty . . . to the ‘old systems’ ", telling an interviewer in 1995 that he "occasionally . . . met a person who rather nostalgically said, ‘Well, I had a pretty good experience [of] articles, it was a pretty good experience. I don’t know that I would have been better if I had gone to law school or not.’ "

It seems probable that nostalgia mixed promiscuously and to varying degree with both principle and raw, blinkered conservatism to constitute an unholy alliance in opposition to the creation of a law faculty. The written record of this opposition is sparse, providing little evidence from which to reconstruct the particular mixtures of personalities and motivations that led some lawyers to oppose university legal education. As in many areas of British Columbia legal history, it is the recollections of individuals who participated in developing the University of British Columbia law faculty rather than the written record that is most helpful. These recollections consistently suggest that important forces opposed the university initiative.

It is less clear how opposition was expressed, by whom, or why. Alfred Watts has recalled that, by the time the University of British Columbia established a law faculty, the Benchers presented a united front in support of legal education. Nevertheless, there was considerable opposition to either the very idea of a university law faculty or to the particular plan being put into place. Watts noted, for example, that:

[T]here was a lot of—not a lot but there was considerable complaints from people (such people as Pat Maitland, who was a very very fine lawyer, Attorney General), who were most hesitant to see the benchers knock out the old five year rule whereby a man could simply article for five years, without a degree, and write the examinations and then be called to the Bar, as opposed to going to law school. . . . The benchers wanted to make a clean sweep of it and have nothing more to do with it and leave it up to the law faculty, and as usual in these things there’s some sort of a compromise worked out and the five year rule was carried on for some years and then it was eventually dropped.

If it seems likely that Maitland’s objections in 1945 (he had served on the law society committee to establish a law faculty as early as 1937) were precise and focused on one or two issues, other opposition may have been more generalized. Many of the higher court judges apparently opposed the very idea that book learning should form any significant part of professional training. Chief Justice Nathan Nemetz told Professor Peter Burns in 1995 that "the local judiciary at the time were divided" on the merits of creating a law faculty. "There was," he said, "no frontal support . . . they thought that this was all going to end up in a sort of place where you’d be learning a lot of theory and not knowing anything about how to practice law and this troubled them. I remember the then Chief Justice, Bird, who didn’t like the idea at all . . . these people had gone through the former system where they actually had no education, no university education at all. . . . and they . . . I think there was a bit of an inferiority complex about this proposition." Nemetz explained further that, at a time when "we only had about seven Supreme Court judges, as opposed to a hundred and five now" opposition from this quarter was "a bit of a problem".

It seems too that many senior practitioners beyond the realm of governmental and judicial office entirely disliked the idea of a university tampering with professional credentialling. Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie told Professor Marilyn MacCrimmon during the course of a 1995 interview that "the older practitioners were suspicious" of the new law faculty, "not only [because] of the fact that we’d be there in too great numbers, but also [because] we’d have the sort of high faluting university education that had no contact with the reality of the law. The only way to do it is, you know, to be at a law office, follow the lawyer around, carry the briefcases." Similarly, John L. Farris pointed to opposition within the legal profession when he recalled the work his father (Senator Wallace Farris) and uncle (Chief Justice Wendell Farris) did to develop a university law faculty. In addition to their work with the provincial government and university, the two Farris brothers struggled against an ingrained anti-intellectualism of their professional peers: "what Dad and Wendell mostly did was to talk to these fellows, the older members, their contemporaries at the Bar and urge them to support this".

Before his appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada, Mr. Justice C. H. Locke had served as a Bencher of the Law Society of British Columbia, including a term as "treasurer" (president). Nearly fifty years later, Dean Curtis recalled an interview he had with Locke soon after his arrival in Vancouver:

The then treasurer of the Law Society, the President in other words, was Mr. Charles Locke, later Mr. Justice Locke, of the Supreme Court of Canada. Mr. Locke came to me when the decision had been made and when I arrived here. He said, "Mr. Curtis, I want to tell you that I was never in favour of this. It was much discussed by the Benchers, the majority voted against me. Clearly they wanted this law school. They wanted the University Law School and . . . I, of course, loyally went along with them. Now I’ll tell you that I will give you every support that you ask for." That I thought was enormously encouraging because he was a top-flight practitioner. In other words, "I’d lost the case, but there it is. Now we go ahead." And he was true to his word.

Nathan Nemetz, formerly Chief Justice and a past Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, shown here circa 1975.

Locke’s reasons for opposing the idea of developing a university law faculty unfortunately remain mysterious. He had moved to British Columbia from Winnipeg and it may be that he imported the spirit of hostility to academic legal education that had come into ascendance in Manitoba during the 1920s. Certainly, he told Dean Curtis that his opposition to a university law faculty derived from having "been through all this in Manitoba" and knowing "the controversy there". The deeper concerns that drove the Manitoba profession in this direction are also, however, unknown. Dean Curtis could only guess that "there was a loyalty and attachment to what essentially was the same as Ontario, copying the English system, namely that the Bar ran the educational qualifications for the Bar. Universities were quite remote from that and had no real part in it."

Whatever motivated individual lawyers or judges to oppose university legal education during the inter-war years, the profession coalesced behind their new faculty once it had actually begun. The year 1945 marked a turning point from which the legal profession and the University of British Columbia never looked back.

Chapter 6