History

Thanks to a generous donation of $175,000 from Peter A. Allard, the Faculty is currently creating an online historical law archive to preserve its rich history. This history will include information about the Faculty's former deans, professors, alumni and others who have made significant contributions to the Faculty and the broader community.

One important element of this Project will be an ambitious oral history project to interview and record former faculty, staff, and students about their memories of the Law Faculty and the impact of their time here on their lives in the legal profession and in other walks of life. Instruction began at the Law Faculty in September, 1945, and a great many people have passed through its doors since then. Focusing first on the early years, the oral history project will build a rich repository of recorded interviews. These oral histories will be lodged in the UBC Archives for the use of historians and others.  In the immediate future, the oral histories will also form the basis of short biographical profiles that will appear in the UBC Law Alumni Magazine and other venues and publications.

The UBC Faculty of Law has hired Dr. Richard Somerset Mackie to direct the Oral History Project. Richard is a freelance historian, biographer, editor, and author of five books. Two of his books - Trading Beyond the Mountains (1997), a study of the HBC west of the Rockies, and Island Timber (2000), a social history of the lumber industry on Vancouver Island - won the Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing, and Island Timber was shortlisted for the Haig-Brown Prize. His most recent book, Mountain Timber (2009), received an Honorable Mention from the BC Historical Federation. Richard received his Ph.D. from the History Department at UBC in 1993, and is now Associate Editor and Book Reviews Editor at the journal BC Studies.

Richard will be working with student assistants and interviewing will begin this summer (July, 2012). He will have a base in Allard Hall and welcomes ideas for interview subjects. He can be reached by e-mail at historyproject@law.ubc.ca. Please feel free to email Richard if you have suggestions for interview subjects.