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Chapter 8: Experiences at Law School

Student Social Life

Student social life in the early University of British Columbia law faculty varied according to the individual tastes, inclinations, and finances of the students. Asked by Dean Lynn Smith to recall social life in her student days, Madam Justice Mary Southin responded simply that it "depended on what sort of social life one chose to have".

A typical day in the life of a law student involved a predictable and comfortable schedule divided in three parts. The morning was given to classes from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.; lunch-hour might be taken up by various student activities; and afternoons were given to reading and private study. Most campus clubs met at 12:30 p.m. "so you would have your lunch and go to that and then be out by twenty after one". After lunch hour Madam Justice Southin recalls returning to the faculty’s army huts and its small library. "You could go in there, find yourself a place, and you could work right through till it was time to leave and go home for supper."

It was certainly possible for law students to participate in the life of the larger university. There were, she said, "a lot of the students who belonged to campus clubs which were not for law students only. . . . I mean that’s how you got to know somebody . . . How would you get to know anybody to take you out unless you joined something." Two or three law students of her generation belonged to the "Radio Society"; some joined a drama society known as the "Players Club" ("the Players were of course notoriously snooty"), while "fraternities and sororities" were attractive to others. The young Mary Southin participated in a sort of mock Parliament known as "Parliamentary Reform", which "put on debates at lunch time", brought in speakers, and occasionally organized a full mock-Parliament: "somebody would compose some silly Bill and we would have a debate and then afterwards have coffee". It was, she remembers, "more for fun than anything". Though she "was a Progressive Conservative out there" and others were active in different political parties, "not all the people in Parliamentary Reform were in politics". The usual ebb and flow of student elections occupied some students some of the time—although student politics were something nobody at the law faculty seemed to take particularly seriously.

The degree to which law students found social outlet within the university varied with to individual inclination and law school generation. Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie recalled "very little in the way of extracurricular activities" apart from "some political activity":

I can remember there was a group of Progressive Conservatives and they were making a big fuss all the time. They would drive through the campus in their Model T Ford wearing top hats and all that sort of stuff . . . to encourage people to come to a debate that was being conducted between them and the Liberals.

Lack of facilities on campus made it difficult for the first few classes to participate as fully in the life of the university as their successors. Until a university law library developed, students had to make a daily migration to the downtown courthouse if they were to do any class preparation. McKenzie recalls his 1945 class as being "adrift from the university", "separate", "encapsulated" in the law school, and uninvolved "with the campus at large". "Our concerns," he explained, "were localized, focused on the law, what was happening at the university, what was happening down at the Court House."

For Chief Justice Allan McEachern, however, the decision to remain apart from the extracurricular life of the university was more deliberate. Although he recalls other law students taking part in clubs and student activities of various sorts, his own involvement was limited to athletics. This choice was simply a personal matter: "I’ve never been a joiner, I’ve never belonged to a lot of clubs."

Of course, lack of involvement in clubs and organized activities does not imply that an individual is unaffected by the cultural network that envelops them. A significant part of student social life is found in the quiet, informal places where education, common interest, and friendship intersect. Dean Curtis, according to Diana Priestly, "tried to make it a good atmosphere". The library circulation desk, predictably enough, "was a great social center" and the law buildings of her time had not one but two student common rooms: students were segregated on the basis of gender. The relatively small number of women students consequently got to know each other well despite large entry classes. They would also, from time to time, be invited to coffee parties organized by Doris Curtis for women students, faculty wives, and student wives.

A gender divide of some sort also found expression in the way informal study groups coalesced. Women, Diana Priestly remembers, "tended to work with the other women students until you passed your first year exams and then in second year and third year you were included in the study groups that the men had". Although Mary Southin felt these groups to be "a waste of time", she remembers other students finding "a kind of social life" by working together in "little study groups" ("nearly all men"), who would "study and then go drinking or something or other".

Not all student activity orbited around law. Both Mr. Justice McKenzie and Madam Justice Southin recall other students playing cards in the faculty common room:

M. Southin: . . . a lot of the young men, of course some of them weren’t so young, they used to play a lot of poker and bridge in the common room.
. . . Sometimes they were gambling . . . they weren’t just playing . . . they were gambling . . . and I’m sure that was against all the university rules. . . . but they were grown men, for heaven’s sake, I don’t know how the university could have been expected to tell a man in his thirties, who had spent years flying over Germany or fighting through France, that he was not to play bridge for money in the common room at the law school. . . . and I don’t think that anybody tried.

Political debate was also fairly lively in common room and corridor. This debate was not then restricted to the safe Canadian middle ground between Liberal and Tory. Unlikely though it may seem, the early student body included several committed leftists who were not always given to suffering the views of their more mainstream fellow students in silence. Gordon Martin, a student in the first class, subsequently earned a prominent place in Canadian legal history by being denied admission to the legal profession solely because his political views were deemed unacceptable by British Columbia lawyers at the time. Remembered by Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie as "a doctrinaire Communist", Martin "thought they had the better idea". Right-wing students would engage him "in argument . . . on a daily basis" and the two sides "would argue vociferously all day as to which system was the right one".

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