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Chapter 11: The Modern Web of Legal Education

The Expanding Law School, part 1

BY THE MID 1950S LEGAL EDUCATION in British Columbia was very different from a decade earlier. The most dramatic changes by far concerned the rapid development of the programme of professional legal education at the University of British Columbia. Each spring the law faculty routinely graduated many more lawyers than had ever previously qualified in the province in any single year. Graduates had inundated the profession and made up fully half of the membership of the provincial law society. Even after the surge of veterans had run itself out, student numbers stabilized at just over two hundred (in all three classes) throughout the 1950s. The expanding post-war economy absorbed them all with unanticipated ease.

In a few years the campus lawyers had progressed from homelessness to squatters occupying a collection of humble army-surplus huts. From those humble origins in turn they had risen to their 1951 status as lords and ladies of a magnificent, custom-built manor overlooking Howe Sound and the coastal mountains of Vancouver’s north shore. The law library had grown during the same period from a mere two volumes (which belonged to Dean Curtis and Professor Read) to the finest collection in the country. The full-time faculty complement had grown beyond all precedent. Although no institution of legal education in common-law Canada had previously had more than four full-time faculty (Dalhousie’s pattern was "three men and a boy", that is three genuine full-timers aided by one junior instructor on limited term appointment), the University of British Columbia had seven professors on staff by 1949. Even in the face of declining enrolments, the faculty continued to grow as Dean Curtis and University of Toronto Law Dean "Caesar" Wright "whipsawed" their universities to their mutual benefit. The full-time faculty stood at fourteen by the end of the 1950s. The innovations introduced in 1945 had carried curriculum considerably beyond the Canadian Bar Association’s "standard curriculum", and the new faculty produced the tremendous output of teaching materials necessary to make the "case method" workable.


[W]ell, Caesar was a great ally and the telephone is a great instrument to use and I’m afraid we whipsawed our respective university bureaucracies a bit because if Caesar was able to get another fellow on, well, that was pretty good for me and vice versa. And Caesar—he loved that sort of thing. Caesar had a sound instinct for vigorous, vigorous advocacy.
—Dean George Curtis, 1980

University legal education had become securely established as the sole means of qualifying for the legal profession in British Columbia despite its uncertain origins only a decade earlier. The new institution held a place of pride both in relation to the local legal profession and among leading law faculties in North America and the Commonwealth. "On the whole," Dean Curtis recalled, "the decade of the 1950s within the law school was a period of calm and settled growth after the excitement, the improvisations, and the scarcities of the beginning period."

Although this history has principally traced the origins of contemporary university legal education in British Columbia, it would be wrong to leave the impression that the story of legal education ends with the stabilized and secure university law faculty in the 1950s. Time does not stand still and legal education has never been confined to the teaching programmes of university law faculties. The modern "web" of legal education has stretched out in several directions.


[L]aw schools are not teaching or laying the foundation for practising tomorrow morning. You’ve got to think twenty years ahead if you can. That’s when these people are going to be influential. Try to think of the trends in the law. . . . I think we should be very careful that some of the broadening subjects get a place. Now that’s why we made International Law compulsory originally. . . . That’s opening the window of your mind to larger things . . . also Jurisprudence and sociological subjects which are very common; I approve of that.
—Dean George Curtis, 1980

First, the past several decades have seen continuing changes in the law faculty curriculum. Diana Priestly recalls that during her time on the University of British Columbia faculty (1953 to 1963) fairly dramatic changes took place: "[W]e had suddenly taken on five or six young faculty members and had sectioned the classes. We were no longer teaching the big classes and they had brought in the idea of having some choice in the courses for the students". New faculty, "were fresh from graduate school . . . [and] wanted to do small seminars in their particular subject interests". Curtis recalled that Professor Carrothers taught the first seminar offered at the law faculty. It was a "great success" and resulted in the faculty trying "to add . . . more seminars which allowed you to pick subjects that don’t fall into the old conventional pattern". More ambitious reforms were possible again in the 1960s, largely because faculty resources had grown, it was possible to keep class size within reasonable limits, and sufficient faculty time was freed to permit both research and the intensive class preparation required for advanced specialist seminars.

The curriculum of the 1950s was viewed retrospectively as "pitifully sparse" by Dean Curtis. "Practically nothing but the ‘core’ subjects were offered," he recalled. "Doctrine ruled and analysis dominated." One University of British Columbia law student of this era later expressed grave dissatisfaction with the focus on core subjects. It was, he thought, "the great weakness" of legal education at the time "that it was never truly theoretical yet it was never really practical. All we did was court of appeal judgments." The result, according to this critic, was that students did not learn the practical requirements of legal work but simultaneously failed to obtain any significant understanding of "history or comparative law or jurisprudence or any kind of conceptual analysis of the role of law in the community". Looking at the 1950s curriculum from the other side, however, even this dissatisfied consumer of legal education was prepared to concede the benefit of "the Harvard–British analytical approach" as providing a powerful training in "legal analysis". Similarly, Dean Curtis has expressed his view that the established curriculum of the period had very real advantages despite its limitations. The "decisional law", he said, was subjected to "sharp evaluation in the classroom". "[I]t was accepted that one of the principal roles of university law schools was to subject the cases to close and critical examination. The case method of instruction, widely used, lent itself to the dissection of received doctrine, and of its strengths and weaknesses."


The word "irrelevant"’ is widely used by student radicals these days, but it’s a good word, a handy weapon in the trial lawyer’s arsenal, and it aptly describes the relationship between the teaching program at almost any law college and the practice of law.

Because your training is so irrelevant, most of you will become irrelevant lawyers. You will become irrelevant because you will be doing the thing that is expected of you—upholding the status quo for a generous fee.

You will not have been trained to be critical of the status quo, to see its faults, to try to effect change. You will have been stuffed with a lot of meaningless jargon and will parrot to your clients and to the courts the old clichés and the 17th and 18th century principles which lawyers dutifully uphold and which when applied arrest the process of progressive change.

—William Deverell, 1968


Even as the University of British Columbia law faculty was settling into a comfortable routine, new currents were welling up in the world of legal ideas and Canadian society was undergoing massive change. Both the professional and the scholarly context of legal training were being transformed. Massive growth of the university sector, the increasing, endemic "professionalization" of Canadian society, and the beginnings of the many cultural revolutions known retrospectively simply as The Sixties were just around the corner. Calls for greater "relevance" in law school, student choice, and an expanded curriculum were soon heard. The University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, along with other leading Canadian law schools, incrementally expanded its course offerings, developed new seminars, and offered "the extensive curricular choices that are now the common feature of modern legal education".

Chapter 11 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