UBC Law: History

Chapter 10: Buildings and Books

The UBC Cases Series

A perennial problem of legal education relates to the intensity of use of a finite number of readings drawn from a large number of original sources. Students in any particular course taught by the case method will be required to read court decisions reported in any number of report series from any one of the world’s common-law jurisdictions. A very real and practical problem arises. At any given moment as many as sixty or a hundred students might descend upon a law library to read a single case that occupies only a small portion of one volume of a much larger, expensive report series. It would be necessary to carry multiple copies of many different published law reports in order to meet this predictable demand. The direct cost, storage costs, and wear on a library collection would be immense. For better or ill, most North American law faculties have responded by calling upon their students to read excerpted cases reproduced in course-specific "casebooks".

The University of British Columbia law faculty, as the first university-centred institution of mass education for the legal profession in common-law Canada, pioneered the development of casebooks. The faculty’s "golden age" in casebook production was memorialized by Professor A. W. R. Carrothers in a mid-1950s article aptly entitled "By the Page and the Pound". Casebooks began, he reports, out of necessity. The very rapid increase in enrolment during the faculty’s first years stretched its resources to the breaking point. By 1946, according to Carrothers, "it was apparent that the bound reports would not stand up to the foreseeable wear and tear. Besides, the case method of instruction made it desirable that there be an opportunity for both student and instructor to have the assigned cases before him in the lecture room. The answer was the case book." The damage to library holdings was in fact a very serious issue. Diana Priestly recalls that heavy student use of original sources in classes where no casebooks were available wrought great destruction on the library: "any course that didn’t have a casebook, like Shipping, all the old, early cases in the [English Reports] that were used in Shipping, the pages were just crumbling out of the book".

Dean Curtis shelving books in the University of British Columbia law library, 1951.

During a 1995 interview, Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie explained the teaching materials used by the early law faculty:

The library, of course didn’t exist at the beginning, . . . somehow or other, George Curtis’s secretary produced what we called "casebooks". She had an ancient Gestetner duplicating machine, that they had discovered somewhere, it was a castoff from a law office. I remember it had purple ink and these things are ground out on butcher paper and bound in some primitive kind of fashion . . . and a very limited number of them. Your eyes would water, trying to read this blurry print, but they were cases, just a collection of cases that were brought from an assortment of different subjects, but . . . you could only look at them, you could only use them in class. You couldn’t take them home, except after nine o’clock, if you brought them back by eight-thirty or something like that. The facility we did have was the downtown law library. We had the use of it and that was a very clear advantage over the existing system, however good the law library is . . . . That brought us into contact with what was happening in the Court House.

By 1947 the new faculty had obtained permission to use two casebooks produced elsewhere in Canada and Professor "Pappy" Read had compiled a set of materials for UBC students on "Bills and Notes". Thus began the "UBC Cases" series. Almost half a century later it is easy to underestimate the importance of this new departure. Canadian legal publishing was nowhere near as advanced as it is now and Canada’s tiny, overworked law faculties had not yet begun to produce scholarship and teaching materials at today’s levels. In the conditions prevailing in the 1940s, the production of casebooks was simultaneously essential to the law faculty’s educational mission, a service to practising lawyers, and a contribution of some importance to Canadian legal education at large. Carrothers reported in "By the Page and the Pound":

Over nine thousand case books have been supplied to law students through the University of British Columbia Book Store since 1947. Of sixteen published books 12 were edited by members of the Faculty of Law, one was revised by permission from an earlier work, one was a supplement to an earlier work, and two were republished with permission. Behind these figures lies an unsurpassed record of service to Canadian legal education. Members of the legal profession in this province are aware of the case book programme at the Law School, for over half the profession are now graduates of the Faculty of Law. . . . And many graduates (and more senior members of the profession also) have found it convenient to use the case books as a handy reference to the leading cases on the subject covered. Indeed a number of lawyers practising in more remote parts of the province where a good law library is not readily accessible have come to rely on their case books for materials on first principles. There must be few law offices in British Columbia in which UBC Cases are unused or unknown.

Student volunteers move law books from army huts to the new law building at the University of British Columbia, 1951.

Editorship of the casebooks was never claimed by any individual during the early years—Carrothers explained that they were thought of as "the product of a community of effort" regardless of who had actually taken on the primary responsibility for a particular set of materials. Most of the full-time faculty and a number of the part-timers took "responsibility" for seeing materials "through the press" during this period: G. F. Curtis, F. Read, M. MacIntyre, G. D. Kennedy, J. R. Westlake, A. W. R. Carrothers, L. J. Ladner, S. J. Remnant, and D. McK. Brown.

In an era before electronic data transmission, word-processing, and photocopying, production was an onerous undertaking. The faculty relied on an outside printer, "Mr. Best" who, Diana Priestly said, "had an old Gestetner machine . . . the [original law] books went down with Mr. Best, and he did the typing straight onto his stencils". The result, Carrothers recounted, was a series of "heavy limp books, with their legal size mimeographed pages, brown covers, and shoe string binding—legal education by the page and the pound".

By the mid-1950s the University of British Columbia’s heyday as a producer of casebooks was over. Although their materials were then used in fourteen courses at eight Canadian law schools, Carrothers noted that a number of converging forces militated against the faculty retaining its pre-eminence in this field. It was beginning, he said, "to appear that case book production at UBC has passed its peak". The reasons were varied: "decreased enrolment, increasing costs of production, and the understandable desire of law teachers in other Canadian universities to edit for publication and even as commercial ventures case books of their own".

Chapter 11