UBC Law: History

Chapter 11: The Modern Web of Legal Education

Innovation in the Teaching of Law, part 1

Meanwhile, across the Georgia Strait, curriculum innovation had continued at the University of British Columbia law faculty. A November 1969 Report of the Curriculum Committee of the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia endorsed the 1964 reforms. The Ontario law society had just loosened its reins on Ontario law schools, opening the doors to curriculum innovation across the country—and the University of British Columbia committee expressed relief at being "freed for the first time from the shackles of Ontario". Further innovation was proposed. The committee thought the "total range and content" of courses should be increased and, in particular, that it was necessary to overcome an existing "heavy bias toward private law". "[I]t could almost be argued," they said, "that the present curriculum forces a student toward a specialization in commercial law and limits his ability to obtain a general legal education." Importantly, it was emphasized that "[t]he boundaries of legal studies are not fixed and immutable" and that law should reach out to the social sciences much more than had previously been the case. The committee emphasized that "we should seek the assistance of teachers in other disciplines in establishing courses which are of immediate relevance to lawyers in that they involve legal problems (e.g., Law and Psychiatry) even though the courses span several University disciplines". As a result, the number of compulsory subjects was reduced, room was opened up for student choice, and a much expanded range of courses and seminars were developed.

The observations of the two University of British Columbia curriculum committee reports and the process by which the University of Victoria law faculty was developed serve as useful reminders of an important point. Ron Cheffins’s appointment to teach political science during the mid-1960s is reminiscent of the appointment nearly fifty years earlier of another lawyer to teach in an arts faculty. Cheffins, like Henry Angus at the University of British Columbia at the end of the First World War, taught law-related courses to many students who never aspired to become lawyers. Just as law is pervasive in our society, so too legal content pervades the university curriculum.

The current University of British Columbia Faculty of Law is housed in the Curtis Building, named in honour of the faculty’s founding dean.

Even the most cursory survey of any contemporary university calendar reveals that law cannot be neatly confined to a professional school. A good deal of "legal education" takes place in British Columbia universities entirely outside the law faculties. The accompanying tables indicate that many courses taught to students in a wide range of programmes at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria have substantial legal content. The list would no doubt be considerably larger if it had been developed from a review of detailed course descriptions so as to ferret out every course that had any legal content whatsoever. Law impinges on every aspect of human life and, therefore, on every humanity and social science discipline.


Ken Lysyk succeeded Bertie McClean as dean from 1976 to 1982, when the torch was passed to Peter Burns. Ken had both a scholarly and a practice background in constitutional and native law. Under his calm and cool stewardship, there were major curriculum changes and the faculty moved into its Asian law programme; soon after, Ken was appointed to the Bench.	Peter T. Burns, dean of the law faculty from 1982 to 1991 is a widely respected leader who strongly promoted scholarship within the faculty, oversaw a number of new appointments, and worked to ensure good relations with Bench and Bar.

British Columbia’s most coherent programme in legal education outside of the two law faculties is provided by Simon Fraser University’s School of Criminology. With over twenty full-time faculty engaged in teaching and research in relation to "law and society", the school is an important Canadian centre of legal studies. Degrees are offered at both the undergraduate (bachelor’s) and graduate (master’s and doctoral) levels. The programme makes no attempt to imitate a professional law school curriculum and its graduates earn no qualification toward the practice of law. Nonetheless, they do undertake an extended, rigorous "legal education" and as such are, equally with professional school students, heirs to earlier programmes that form an important part of the heritage of professional legal education in British Columbia.

Finally, a good deal of "legal education" takes place outside the walls of universities altogether. The British Columbia legal profession participates both in an extensive continuing legal education programme for practising lawyers and in an extremely well-developed professional legal training course required of all articling students.

Beyond the legal profession, law today is taught through public legal education programmes, in high schools, and as a necessary part of the formal professional training required of accountants, paralegals, real estate professionals, notaries public, insurance brokers, and many, many others.

Chapter 11 continued