UBC Law: History

Chapter 8: Experiences at Law School

Selling Pencils

The experience of legal education is always strongly coloured by the likelihood of finding a good job upon graduation. So the mood of professional school students is strongly and directly affected by their assessment of the likely economic return for their educational investment. The legal profession periodically experiences panic around the perception that there are "too many lawyers" and this view can have immediate repercussions on the mood within the academy.

While "generation X"—and even some of the "baby boom"—often look back with envy at a generation whose working life corresponded precisely with the sustained economic expansion that followed the Second World War, it was by no means clear to university students during the 1940s that the future bode well for them. One student veteran, returned to university with the help of veteran benefits, is reputed to have joked with his colleagues about the bleak prospects he foresaw: "Well, I don’t know what you fellows are going to do but I’m going to sell pencils at Georgia and Granville because there’s not going to be jobs for all of us." Chief Justice McEachern recalled how the future looked during his student years:

We were all in a rush because we thought that there were so many lawyers coming through the system that there wasn’t going to be room for us all. . . . it was a time of great uncertainty. . . . we really wondered what we were all going to do when we got out. . . . There were only about five to six hundred lawyers in the entire province and here we had a class of two hundred. All of us who took the double degree thought we made the most serious mistake of our lives, we lost a whole year and that we’d be a year behind in getting the positions in the professions . . . .

That things in fact turned out quite differently ("the profession just grew, and grew and grew and there was room for us all") reveals only one reason why economics is called the "dismal science". Students at the time had every reason to think their economic prospects bleak.

Life as a law student in mid-century British Columbia was even more directly affected by the world of work in two ways. Despite the tremendous financial boost the veteran’s benefits provided, many students found it necessary to find part-time work in order to support themselves and their families during the course of their studies. Legal education then, as now, was designed around the fiction that students were financially ready, willing, and able to dedicate themselves full-time to academic work during the university term. "Working at other jobs," Diana Priestly recalls, "was not encouraged." Nonetheless, economic necessity pressed many students—especially those married with children—into the market for part-time work.

Sandwich Courses

Law students faced the world of work in another way too. Under the earliest arrangements entered into between the university and the law society, British Columbia’s programme of legal education was in effect a "sandwich" course that interspersed academic and practical ("clinical") education for the legal profession. Chief Justice McEachern recalled, "we were expected to article in the summer between the First and Second Year . . . and spend four months of each of three summers" in order to be fully qualified exactly three years after beginning legal studies. In theory, students completing their articles in this way were expected to make a clean break from "articles" when classes recommenced in the autumn. There is some evidence, however, that a few firms, accustomed to full-service, long-term articling students, may not always have encouraged students to break completely from the law firm on returning to class. Some students may have ended up in effect continuing with articles while enrolled in nominally full-time studies.

Chief Justice McEachern recalls the search for articles as "a rather desperate sort of affair even then as it is now". One historical constant seems to be that "people who had associations, family associations, or connections didn’t seem to have any trouble getting placement". The situation became so desperate for others, however, that:

the Dean called a meeting and said that he wanted to see anybody who didn’t have Articles, and I was one of fifteen or twenty at least that went to this meeting and said that we didn’t have Articles. So he said, "Well, I’ll do what I can but give me your names" . . . and so we all put our names down on the sheet, went away and then he called us back, he called eight of us back, and said that a law firm had agreed to take eight students. They recognized an obligation to look after these students in some way and he had taken the list and put our names in a hat, and drew out eight names and mine was one of the fortunate names drawn out of the hat, so I was sent down to the law firm, which is now Russell and DuMoulin.

Ironically, perhaps McEachern’s luck in the draw ended up in his stepping off the "fast track" to qualification:

On the second day down there the senior partner, to whom I had been assigned, came in the evening and sat down as he liked to do and just talk. . . . "You know you are making a terrible mistake, there isn’t enough work here to keep you busy all summer and you should go out and get some life experience and then come back and then article for a whole year. It will put you a year behind, but it will give you a much better chance of getting a position, because we can’t keep all these people that we are taking on as students." I needed the money and I didn’t feel that I was going to argue with the senior partner. So I arranged to disengage myself for the summer and for the next two summers I worked in various industries. He told me to try to get work in a couple of different industries each summer to get the kind of experience that you need to deal with problems in the British Columbia economy . . . .

Following this advice seems not to have caused permanent harm to the professional career of the future Chief Justice.

Chapter 9