UBC Law: History

Chapter 6: The Law School’s Mission

The New Era: Law’s Crucial Mission

The idealism and sense of mission Dean Curtis attempted to express by his choice of a motto for this, the first Canadian law school founded in a generation, was no merely idiosyncratic, personal expression. It tapped into deeply felt convictions of the day that touched student, professor, lawyer, and citizen alike.

On January 17, 1946, the Honourable Wendell Farris, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, addressed the opening ceremonies which formally launched the University of British Columbia law faculty. His topic was "The New Era". The new era Farris wished to speak to was not just the new phase of British Columbia legal education that he gave his imprimatur to on that occasion but the new beginning of human history marked by the new year. Chief Justice Farris noted the course upon which the world was launched following the collapse of the German and Italian armies, the "awful revelation made to the world of the great power of destructiveness as demonstrated by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki", the unconditional surrender of Japan, and the start of the Nuremberg trials. He was greatly interested in the new era of legal education for reasons that went well beyond the parochial interests of a provincial legal profession. Farris explained that the education of lawyers was a matter of pressing concern to the world at large. His speech merits lengthy quotation for it conveys the hopes held out for university professional education by his generation and simultaneously reveals the immediacy with which world events were felt in the local arena.

"The year 1946," Farris noted, "opens a new era for mankind, in which era lawyers will be called upon to play a more prominent part in world affairs than at any time in history." The future hope of the world was to be found, he thought, in the rule of law. English history provided a chart or schema he hoped to see replicated on a world scale:

In England there have been three rules—the rule of Anarchy, the rule of Kings and the rule of law, and only under the rule of law did Democracy flourish and grow. Over our history in international affairs to a large extent the rule of Anarchy alone has existed. That rule in brief is "might is right".
The year 1946 ushers in the new rule of International Law, and with this Rule of Law inevitably must follow a real world democracy.
. . . it was not the Norman Conquest but the Common Law of England which evolved constitutional freedom out of chaos, revolution and despotism.
Bacon, Coke, Blackstone, Mansfield, Brougham, Erskine and hundreds of others, by the law and through the law, have done more for peoples and States than all of the warriors of the world.
As the result of the war it has been necessary that bureaucracies should be set up and to a large extent the affairs of our country have been run by regulation rather than Statute Law. Eternal vigilance must be exercised to prevent this bureaucracy spreading out its tentacles. Its growth is insidious. The culmination of bureaucratic control is the destruction of freedom itself. It is the duty of lawyers to give leadership in this regard, not in any selfish manner but to maintain the freedom which is our heritage and which has been maintained for us by the gallant sacrifice of such young men and women who largely compose the members of the student body of this Law School.
We must work together as one body, realizing the great privileges we have and the responsibility which comes with privilege. Never in the history of the world has the opportunity been as great as at present to give leadership at this time, but it is our privilege to do so. We must stand together and while maintaining the individuality of the great traditions of our profession, march with the rest of decent society for the betterment of mankind.

University President Norman MacKenzie spoke on the same occasion. He believed that "[t]he founding of a Faculty of Law will mean a great deal to the University and to the Province and to Canada. Legal education is a great deal more than the training of practising lawyers, important as that may be . . . it contributes much to all the profession and to the community and the nation". Similarly, a senior British Columbia legal practitioner, E. A. Lucas, visited the law faculty early in 1946 and reported that the student body consisted of "earnest young men and women, intent upon devoting their lives and their talents to upholding the great principle that there can be no liberty without the supremacy of the law". Lucas joined Chief Justice Farris and President MacKenzie in believing that law’s crucial cultural mission was to be entrusted to the next generation of lawyers, being educated now for the first time in the university:

We are all familiar with the creaky croaking from the thick layer of the unthinking. "There’s too many lawyers; the lawyers get it all; did you say lawyers or liars?" The real situation, past, present and future, in this or any other province, is that the progress of public and semi-public activities depends to a very large extent upon the quality and integrity and the purposive effort of the members of the Bar. Some of us forget sometimes that the tone of the community, good, bad and mixed, is set to a very considerable extent by our profession, dusty wheezing to the contrary notwithstanding.

Similarly high expectations held of legal education are indicated in an address Mr. Justice John E. Read (Canadian Representative on the Court of International Justice) delivered to a section of the Canadian Bar Association in 1947. Legal education, he said, had moral, cultural, and practical objectives. "The first and primary purpose", in his opinion, was moral—the "development within the personality of the student at law . . . [of] those moral qualities which are embodied in the best of our professional traditions". The second objective, providing a general cultural education, was important in marking law’s status as a "learned profession", rather than a mere "trade". By relating law "to the broader fields of human knowledge" Read thought aspiring lawyers would develop "an admirable mental discipline" and "a broad and civilized outlook upon life". The "public profession of law" required that subjects such as comparative law, public international law, conflicts of laws, constitutional law, legal history, and jurisprudence be considered part of "the fundamentals". The narrower aspect of legal education (equipping "the student for the practice of law") was relegated to "third place for two reasons—the moral and the cultural objectives are in fact more important and one can attain the third objective more readily by a flank than by a frontal attack". For Read, as for many others, the lawyer’s mission transcended mundane matters of legal practice. It was important that legal education be structured appropriately to prepare lawyers for a leadership role among citizens.

Chapter 7