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Chapter 8: Experiences at Law School

Returning Veterans’ Refresher Course

The law faculty had started off well in its relations with the practising profession by, in turn, demonstrating its capacity for service. The end of the war had resulted in rapid demobilization not only of large numbers of young men and women considering a career in law for the first time but also of a number of fully qualified lawyers who had abandoned their practices to enlist in the armed forces. With the war over they wanted to re-enter legal practice. Mr. Justice Meredith McFarlane was one: "I had been practicing for . . . oh . . . eight or nine years, just had gotten myself well established when the damn war came along." The immediate problem confronting these returning soldier–lawyers was two-fold. First, they had to "catch up" on legal developments that had taken place during their years in uniform—to learn any new law. More fundamentally, however, they had to adjust their thought processes. Med McFarlane recalled that they needed "to get the idea of the war and the war service out of our minds and to get to be lawyers again".

The new law faculty came up with an idea that at once provided considerable service to the Bar and amounted to a public relations coup for the university. The idea was a simple one that Dean Curtis brought with him from Dalhousie:

How about the guys who had been away 3, 4, 5, 6 years? Can we do something for them? My idea was to set up, what we called in the simple language of those days, a refresher course. Now its got the grand name of Continuing Legal Education, no less. But in those days it was a refresher course. So, I brought that material with me, the subjects and how it was to be organized and so forth. And I preyed on the assistance of Alfred Watts who is a very considerable person in the development of legal education in this province in this period. He was the upcoming secretary of the Law Society . . . . Now . . . while he was still waiting for the formal appointment, he helped me a great deal. He liked this idea of a refresher course. He did the organizing downtown for it, as my hands were pretty full . . . . So he organized it, we had this refresher course. . . . It was very informal in a way, . . . now that refresher course was worth its weight in gold. . . . They thought that was great. We were going to have a law school that was prepared to help out this way, there was a need, an obvious need. "This is what we want, we like this. These guys up at the law school are pretty good fellows," that’s the sort of thing. There was a very conscious effort. Now, effort . . . when I say effort, that is overstating it. Very natural effort.

Overall the "refresher course" provided great service to the Bar and repaid dividends many times over to the law faculty. Dean Curtis concluded "nothing with which the infant law faculty was associated did more to cement the school and the profession than this refresher course". At least one "graduate" of the programme apparently agreed. Med McFarlane recalled his feelings at the time: "It was a great help to getting out of uniform and into a gown again. . . . It was wonderful."

Maintaining Relations with the Legal Profession

Despite good and cordial early relations, it might well have come to pass that even a law faculty with its origins in a committee of the law society would, over time, lose contact with the practising profession. Certainly stories of this sort have unfolded in other places. Practising lawyers are often inclined to believe that their own training represented some sort of historical high watermark of professionalism, and have not infrequently failed to appreciate either educational innovation or the evolving culture of legal education. Academic lawyers for their part can sometimes be resentful of what they perceive as a hard-nosed anti-intellectualism in the Bar and there is always potential for misunderstanding, tension, or even distrust to develop between intellectuals and practical workers. It is a tribute to the commitment and work of the early faculty that relations between "town" and "gown" remained cordial during the first decades of university legal education in British Columbia.

The efforts of Dean George Curtis and his wife, Doris Curtis, are particularly noteworthy in this regard. Curtis clearly had a special duty in matters of importance to the fledgling law faculty and he was, of course, personally committed to fostering good external relations with the legal profession. Despite his solid academic training and years of work at Dalhousie, Curtis recalled that he "never felt a stranger so far as the Bar is concerned. I suppose primarily I regard myself as a teaching lawyer, and no doubts among my academic friends who would say, ‘Isn’t it too bad. Too bad . . . Curtis isn’t a scholar really, you know, he is just an ordinary common attorney.’ " The early faculty built the legal profession into its teaching programme and into its special occasions and events at every opportunity. For example, the official opening of the faculty, early in 1946, was intended to showcase the university to the practising profession and Dean Curtis put some care into its planning. It started a tradition in British Columbia: "The guests of the evening were the members of the Bench and Bar. This was the first of a succession of occasions when the law school reached out its hand in hospitality to the profession."

The pivotal role of the new dean was widely recognized and appreciated. Former Chief Justice Nathan Nemetz commented that "George is a very kind person . . . and he was at that time very energetic . . . and very diplomatic . . . and I think he himself was able to quell the latent antagonism . . . to the school." John L. Farris recalled simply that "George Curtis did a wonderful job of bringing town and gown together. The result was that the profession was proud of the law school."

The role of Doris Curtis in this task is more easily lost but equally important. The social expectations of a dean’s wife in that era were enormous. She must have put great amounts of time and energy into facilitating the sorts of social occasions that were required. Shortly after their arrival in Vancouver, University President Norman MacKenzie pulled Doris Curtis aside to inform her that "anything done to bridge the gap between gown and town would be appreciated". The implication was clear: the university assumed that she would take on significant responsibilities as a hostess in addition to managing the home. While any such comment would be grossly out of place in the 1990s, no offence was taken in the social circumstances of the 1940s. Dean Curtis recalled the great importance of his wife’s contribution to binding a community together:

My wife threw herself into the practice of the ancient art of hospitality with great energy. Our home . . . became the site of welcome for scores of judges, lawyers and business friends from the city. . . . As well, our home was "open house" for our friends of the University faculty. . . . All this meant the building up of a sense of community which is one of the intangible rewards of university life.

This work, invisible, sheltered from historians’ prying eyes, took place in the "private sphere", the home, and the "social" world. It no doubt provided an indispensable foundation without which the more formal efforts of public men to cement good relations between "town and gown" would have foundered.

Student Experiences at the Early Law Faculty

The student experience of the new law faculty was powerfully affected by the circumstances of its creation. An elaborate, complex mythology has developed about this era in British Columbia legal history. The mythology (all myths, I hasten to add, are true) finds expression in reminiscences about "no-nonsense" veterans, war-time huts, shoestring-bound casebooks, small classes, large classes, limited resources, intellectual awakening, libraries, common rooms, debates, moots, dances, and discussions.

Students of the era seem to have thought that the curriculum and teaching methods of the day stood them in good stead. Their comments are often overlain with subtle questioning of more recent innovations. Chief Justice Allan McEachern (LL.B. 1950), for example, is quoted in a 1987 UBC Law Faculty Newsletter, as saying: "We were given an excellent and very disciplined legal education. . . . There were no frills. An important point—the professors were without ‘causes’; they were middle-road legal educators and there was no digression into philosophical subdivisions of law. We were free to think for ourselves, to develop our own ideas. . . . it was an unfolding of universal ideas that was enjoyable and valuable." The early curriculum, he told Professor Robert Franson in 1995, "was fine. It gave me all I needed to know in order to practice and I think that I have a bias about legal education. I think that there’s too much frills and not enough basic principle." "We learned," he said, "what we needed to learn in practice and hadn’t any regrets that we weren’t subjected to any other courses, other than the ones we had."

Madam Justice Southin (LL.B. 1952) similarly thought her legal education to have been "excellent". During the course of a 1994 interview she told Dean Lynn Smith that:

From my point of view it was an excellent education. . . . I had no complaints about it at all! I think it was the best way to teach . . . for a student who was willing to apply himself or herself it couldn’t have been better. And as I say I had never been one for seminars and all that stuff. That "intellectual rubbish" etc. . . . I would have loathed being dragged into that sort of stuff, . . . so I thought it was an excellent education . . . .

Some of the earliest generations of university law students have expressed a sense of gratitude that their legal education concentrated heavily on fundamental material. Madam Justice Southin recalled "a very good grounding in torts, contracts and real property" and thought well of a form of legal education that focused on "fundamentals". These, in her view, retain their value despite changing times and circumstances. She told Dean Lynn Smith in 1994 that "I know you can’t any longer send" students:

out into the world only with Smith’s Leading Cases because the world has changed, but there’s a certain basic attitude to the law concerning the fundamentals of it which students, I think, should be required to study. Now, I don’t see for instance, myself, teaching something called poverty law, for instance, it’s goofy.
A legal education should expose students to that kind of fundamentals, getting some principles into your head and cases into your head. . . . when I graduated from law school I could have . . . written down, on long sheets of paper the names of nearly every case we had studied . . . I committed them all to memory . . . hundreds of them.

By all reports, examinations at the early law faculty were rigorous. They consisted of "traditional law school questions. They were full of pitfalls and . . . so, you had to be able to analyze them". Students were only rarely expected to write essays or term papers but seem not to have objected to a system of education that evaluated them by examination only. Widespread discontent with closed-book examinations, the drudgery of memorization they require, and the unimaginative approaches to study and problem-solving that they sometimes reward still lay in the future.

Overall, students of the early years were pleased with their education. They understood some of the difficulties faced in trying to establish a new faculty and the mood of the student body was uncritical: Chief Justice Allan McEachern reported that he and his peers were "desperate to get finished and get on with our lives. We weren’t going to complain or criticize, we just wanted to get through."

Chapter 8 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