UBC Law: History

Chapter 8: Experiences at Law School

Student Culture and Ethos

The post Second World War University of British Columbia law faculty exerted a tremendous power over its students despite (some might say because of) the adverse conditions they encountered. One tremendously powerful force in fostering both socialization and "school spirit" was simply continuity of close personal contact over long periods of time. Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie has recalled that the early law school had no optional courses. The result was that "[e]verybody was together" for all of their classes. Over the full three-year law degree everyone learned exactly the same subjects from exactly the same teachers. McKenzie recalled "[w]e stayed together during all three years. . . . It was a standard diet for everybody." Under such circumstances the gravitational pull exerted by a peer group of only sixty-five or seventy-five students must have been very powerful indeed.

The social experience would have varied tremendously, however, depending on which of the early classes a student belonged to. Diana Priestly (LL.B. 1950) recalled that in "a class of 200 . . . you didn’t get to know everybody who was in the class, you knew the people who were in the few rows around where you sat. I usually sat in or around the fifth or sixth row, so you knew the people who sat around there. You tended to sit in the same place in class each time." Even at that, the socializing effect of the law faculty must have been strong. Priestly and her peers did not move out of their classroom at all during teaching hours: "you stayed there the whole morning". Not surprisingly, Chief Justice Allan McEachern has similar recollections. His description of a large class moving en bloc from classroom to library to classroom throughout its university career is interesting:

[I]t was a new adventure and in those days . . . there was only two classrooms, and there were two years of law ahead of us, so our class started our lectures for the first year in some other huts that were located on the north-west corner of the main mall of University Boulevard and we had our lectures there and then we trooped, diagonally as it were, across the campus to the site of the law faculty where the library was situated and spent the afternoons in the library, but all of our lectures were up at this intersection that I have mentioned. And then it was an interesting experience because we were all together.

I liked International law . . . but the class as a whole felt very aggrieved because Dr. MacKenzie [later President MacKenzie] assigned essays and we thought that as law students we were above essay writing and so what happened in the school was you inherited, because they were always the same topics given out for essays, you inherited your essay topics along with your books. The person who sold you their books gave you their two essays . . . and you just wrote them out in your own handwriting and handed them in. . . . [One year a person hired to do the marking for Dr. MacKenzie discovered that] . . . there were quite a lot of exactly similar essays, and [he] thought that something wrong was going on and reported this. Well! There was a tremendous faculty meeting I gather about it. [A faculty member] thought we should be expelled. Dr. Mac[Intyre] . . . was in the school by this time and he volunteered to come in and speak sternly . . . about this and I can remember the talk that he gave to the class about this with him trying to keep a straight face and this class full of veterans and he was terribly funny about them. One of the topics we always wrote on was the Palestine situation . . . . He said: "Now here I have before me an essay that has stood the test of time, it ends in 1946. Now I do feel that you could have added a final paragraph and at least brought it up to date. He was terribly funny about it and we all laughed and laughed about the whole thing till it passed over. Those that . . . [were actually identified by the marker] . . . had to write a second essay but the rest of us got off scot-free, got some kind of a mark, I suppose. But that was a "big" event in the year, the year that they discovered that we could no longer use the old International law essays and perhaps Dr. MacKenzie stopped assigning us essays as a result of that."
—Professor Diana Priestly, 1994

The Spirit of the Veterans’ Era

Many of the students shared the idealism of the full-time faculty who taught them and were equally eager to participate in building a better tomorrow. They picked up this idealism, in varying degrees from their teachers, the spirit of the times, and from their own life experience. No account of student culture in the early University of British Columbia law faculty would be complete without referring to the fact that a very high proportion of students had served in Canada’s armed forces during the Second World War. Diana Priestly recalls that although there were "veterans who were very bitter and just wanted to get out and have a peaceful home and be left alone", others were more open to the spirit of public service communicated by their professors and picked up from them the belief that "it was possible to have the perfect world with no war".

The "veteran’s era" has registered strongly in the consciousness of British Columbia lawyers. Many mature students who had put their lives on hold in service of their country, not surprisingly, were in a hurry to get on with life. Confident, enthusiastic, and hard-working, the student-body was in a "no-nonsense" frame of mind. Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie, who began his legal education at the University of British Columbia in 1945, served as president of his class. "The secret of that first class," he recalled in 1995, "was that tremendous enthusiasm." All the suppressed energies of a generation raised in the Great Depression and matured during six years of war were unleashed:

It was just . . .You know the war was over! The war was over and we won! And here it was just opening up . . . new vistas altogether, just a whole new world. We had come out of the Depression and we didn’t really know what lay in store for us, you know, in terms of jobs. Might get a job doing something, nobody knew what. Then all of a sudden to have the opportunity for a professional career. You know it was just overwhelming, it was absolutely wondrous. And that sort of spirit invested all the members of the class and it’s lingered. The first class has been the most faithful of the reuniters, we’ve had, usually every five years or something like that, but a lot of classes have never reunited, or they do it sporadically or they do it without very much enthusiasm. I’m not a reuniter by nature except with my law school, and you know that’s firmly embedded.

Most people who enjoy their education recall in later years that their peers had something "special" about them. Cynics may dismiss accounts of the University of British Columbia’s "veteran’s era" as distortions of memory, but the fond memories of former students are, in this case, strongly corroborated from every available source. Mr. Justice Meredith McFarlane, for example, was well acquainted with the first class but not part of it. A Vancouver lawyer at war’s end, he taught at the law faculty on a part-time, voluntary basis. The first class, he recalled, consisted of "men who knew what they wanted and they were impatient to get on with it". As a group, "the students were as keen as hell. . . . most of them were vets and they were so damned anxious to get the war over and get to be lawyers as soon as they could". Capable, hardworking, enthusiastic, and "damned nice", these students "wanted to listen".

Dean Curtis too recalled the 1945 class as something special. They were, he said, "the keenest students I’ve ever taught".

There they were, the seventy odd veterans, keen as mustard and also, of course, they themselves had been in command. Most of them had been officers or non-commissioned officers. They were used to command. They knew the situation. No complaints. Their attitude was "anything we can do to help, let’s get on with it". And they were superb and certainly, in terms of academic performance, they were well-organized, tremendously self-disciplined hard workers. They’d lost a lot of time out of their lives and they were going to make up for it. . . . Absolutely super and great fun. Great, great fun they were . . . They were all keen for this thing and they were wonderful people to teach.

Diana Priestly confirms that her peers, a few years later on, were part of a culture of "no-complaints": "[w]e weren’t a very complaining crowd, we were just very glad to be at university."

Similarly, E. A. Lucas, senior Vancouver lawyer and self-described "old crock", reported in glowing terms on his 1946 encounter with the student body. He remarked on "the spirit of the enterprise" that he considered "the very essence" of the new faculty. The mood was contagious. Lucas reported an atmosphere "of fresh and eager beginning. Take two hard-baked old crocks like Elmore Meredith and me. Driving back from our session with them, we never stopped talking of the inspiring effect of just looking in on the fine new adventure. The whole set-up is radiant with youth and determination. They know where they are going and they are surely on their way."

The veteran’s era extended over several years. Although the experience of legal education varied considerably, each class was strongly influenced by the presence of large number of veterans. Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie has pointed out that "the ‘veteran era’ . . . lasted, I would imagine, for about five years before all the people filtered out from the army, maybe four years". The preponderance of veterans made itself felt despite dramatic variations from year to year in class size, physical environment, and teaching staff:

War, of course, is a maturing experience if there ever was one, you know, you confront periodically the prospect of not living another day, you know you get into some very dangerous times. . . . you have time to concentrate on . . . life and its meaning all that sort of stuff. We were serious. We really couldn’t wait to get through our legal education, we didn’t want to dawdle over our legal education. We wanted to get it behind us and get our ticket and go out into the world and . . . you know build a house, practice and get going. We were older you see. Time was slipping by.

Unlike some of their successors, students of this generation sought to build a better world modestly and from within existing structures. Mr. Justice McKenzie told an interviewer in 1995 that they did not think "in terms of changing the world" as such. What they hoped to do was simply to make their "mark". Many did so through participation in community undertakings or charitable work. Lawyers, he recalled, "thought that this was an obligation. You know we did really feel a sense of gratitude. I have never, never . . . overcome my sense of gratitude of a benevolent government . . . gave me so much." Diana Priestly too recalls that the idealism of her generation found expression through work and participation in public processes. They wanted, she said, "to be part of the building [of a better tomorrow] and Dean Curtis, of course, instilled in us that it was our duty as educated people to play a part in that and, of course, so many went into government work with that in mind."

Chapter 8 continued