Law School History
The following text is extracted with permission from Law School: The Story of Legal Education in British Columbia written by W. Wesley Pue, Vice Provost & AVP Academic Resources Office of the Vice-President, Academic and Law Professor. Published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, the book offers a full account of the history of legal education in British Columbia.
- The illustrated on-line version is located at http://faculty.law.ubc.ca/Pue/historybook/
- The fully documented version can be found at http://ssrn.com/author=99873
Excerpts from Chapter 10: Buildings and Books
Building a Place for Learning
IN THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION it is perhaps too easily forgotten that ideas, curriculum, teaching methods, and student social life actually need a place to happen. Formal education—legal or otherwise—needs some sort of infrastructure. Classrooms, books, library quarters, offices, support staff, telephone, books, and office equipment and supplies are indispensable to the functioning of any educational institution.
Once the infrastructure is in place its users, without exception, take it for granted. Yet its development takes an enormous amount of the time and energy of institution-builders. Whereas the earliest University of British Columbia law faculty did not have even an embryonic physical plant, within seven years the faculty boasted one of the finest libraries and arguably the best building in the country.
The evolving physical surroundings of the post-war years were an important part of the student experience of the earliest generations of university-educated lawyers in British Columbia. It was also essential work that required enormous energy on the part of the institution’s founding dean.
Status in 1945, part 1
In the first month of planning their new educational endeavour Dean Curtis, Professor Read, and the law faculty secretary, Miss Wright, worked as temporary "squatters" in the university senate chambers. Little more was in place when the faculty began its teaching programme. Lloyd McKenzie recalls that the first University of British Columbia law students began their professional education as temporary tenants of the university’s existing facilities:
We didn’t have any building. . . . the law school existed in the mind of [University of British Columbia president] Norman Mackenzie, and I mean that literally because there was no facility. There was no law school in the bricks and mortar sense. We used a room in Brock Hall, and our lectures were there. . . . We didn’t really have any facility, it was an idea. The law school was an idea. It was people. You know it is sort of a tradition of the teacher at one end of the log and the student at the other, except we didn’t even have a log.
The chronically underfunded university’s facilities had already been stretched to the limit when the war ended in 1945. The institution could scarcely have been less prepared for a flood of war veterans seeking an education. Further, the problem of providing physical space was considerably worsened by the severe shortages of building materials that was also a direct result of the war. There was not the least hope of erecting even the most make-shift temporary structures to accommodate the new students. Fortunately, General Pearkes had offered to make nearby vacated army huts available to the university. During his interview for the deanship, George Curtis had discussed the problem with President MacKenzie, Professor Gordon Shrum (who had taken on responsibility for accommodation), and Jack Lee, the university’s superintendent of buildings and grounds. Dean Curtis recalls that this group decided then "to move six of the proffered huts . . . fit them up for lecture and office space and see how they worked out". If all went well, the law faculty would in due course get its own huts.
The army huts worked out tolerably well and before long British Columbia’s budding Blackstones and Portias were housed in buildings of their own. Two distinctly divergent accounts tell of how the "huts" arrived on campus to form the physical nucleus of the new institution. The more romantic version is provided by E. A. Lucas in an article, "The Law Building", which was published in the Advocate in 1952. In this version the law faculty has its origins in a night-time raid on a deserted army camp:
Seven years ago the war ended and the young men came home to get on with their education. One bright group of them wanted to study law, and there was no law school here. Just the sort of immovable object to challenge George Curtis, backed by an irresistible force known as Norman MacKenzie. One late evening, during the dark of the moon, a number of men went to an empty army camp, sawed several of the huts in two, loaded them on log trucks and landed them on the campus. Permission to do this was said to be expected from Ottawa almost any time. Shortly afterwards, Dean Curtis guided me through mud and darkness by flashlight and his luminous grin into one of the huts.
It may be that Lucas took a certain poetic licence in providing this description. A more matter-of-fact tone is adopted in Dean Curtis’s version of the story. It lacks entirely the elements of stealth and surreptitious visits. Nevertheless, his account too has a quietly heroic quality about it. In late October 1945:
[T]wo forty-foot huts were brought on campus. . . . One morning I was at the office of that kindly man, Dean Daniel Buchanan, talking over some common concern when, with his habitual politeness, the Dean said to me: "I am sorry to break in. But do look out the window. There is the Law School going by."
Along the main mall a flat top was laboriously making its way onto the campus with a hut aboard.
The original huts provided somewhat cramped but welcome quarters for students and faculty alike. Lucas recalled the huts as "now warm and bright", with "the Dean’s Office in one small corner, closed in by some sort of screen to give it dignity". At first only two huts were used. Dean Curtis remembers "[t]hree miniature offices were squeezed into the end of one of them and shelving put along the walls". Within a few days an order of the Dominion Law Reports arrived to form the nucleus of a law library. Impatient and unwilling to await the arrival of university staff, the students immediately took fire axes to the shipping boxes and shelved the books themselves. Now housed and equipped in this rudimentary fashion, a tremendously important phase had been reached in the development of the new institution. University legal education in British Columbia was now tangible.
Status in 1946
By any standard, however, the new huts were barely adequate. They would still be there the following autumn and the law faculty looked forward to the challenge presented by taking in a new entry class each year. The continual expansion of its physical "container" was therefore a pressing need in the earliest days of the faculty. Dean Curtis has recalled that:
[T]he first job when term ended in 1946, was to get two large (120 feet) huts moved . . . and put in shape for law school use. . . .
The building combining two huts functioned well—a library in one wing, six or so offices in one corner, a classroom in the other wing, restrooms discretely out of sight, even a common room for the lively exchange of legal and student gossip. . . .
. . . the surroundings which, even if cramped in humble huts, were surprisingly attractive.
Although they were apparently "pretty crude stuff ", the huts served their immediate purpose and were remembered affectionately by the earliest generation of students. Soon to be complemented by a new, purpose-built law building, the original huts continued in use for nearly three decades and, as a result, are synonymous with legal education in the minds of many generations of British Columbia law graduates.
Madam Justice Southin recalls that the conglomeration of huts that constituted the law faculty in her day "consisted of one big ‘hut’ which was the library. All the books were in there and then there was another one that sort of had a ‘common room’ in it . . . and off it was a little ‘common room’ for the ladies". The faculty members each had "a little cubby hole" for an office and space was generally in short supply. Southin recalls that "maybe there were two rooms where you could get a place to work in but there never seemed to be an absence of the place to do your studies".
Even with the newly expanded quarters, however, the law faculty could not contain the growth in demand for legal education. The faculty had to resort to the expediency of trooping its students off across campus until such time as more permanent quarters could be developed. Madam Justice Southin recalls a daily trek across campus where "there were some big, great big halls that . . . must have been built right after the war, they held 150 students . . . and they were right across the campus". Somewhat inconvenient, perhaps, this arrangement at least kept the faculty functioning until its own permanent building could be put up.
Status in 1951, part 1
The need for a new building to house the law faculty was soon apparent. Although student needs could (barely) be met by the assembled army shacks, the conditions in which the growing law library was housed was a matter of some concern. The library was quickly developing into a valuable resource yet was housed in huts that, according to army estimates, had only a twenty-minute life expectancy in the event of fire. Dean Curtis fell into the habit of making inspections of the buildings late each night as a precaution. Persuading the cash-strapped university to invest in a new building for a new faculty was, however, a difficult matter. After a "period of advocacy" that laid heavy emphasis on the danger of losing a unique collection of 20,000 or more hard-to-replace books, the university gave its approval to an expenditure of $325,000 to erect a law building.
The new building was designed to be simple and workable. Its exterior lines were clean and modern. Inside:
[t]he Main Reading Room was the centre-piece. Its deep windows gave a view which must be unrivalled—the harbour entrance in the foreground, the mountains rising behind one after the other to the distant horizon. The north light—the "artist’s light"—was what we wanted for a reading room, and was balanced by high narrow windows around the other walls. The walls were lined with books—space, on a tight budget, was at a premium—and as well [they were] in batteries of chest-high shelves arranged between tables and chairs. The floor shelves served as furniture to "break up" the floor area, and yet were not so high to cut off light from the windows. For General Assemblies and the like the free-standing floor shelves could be moved and chairs put in their place. Altogether it was an economical, efficient and pleasant facility.
. . .On each side of the Main Reading Room, were two lesser sized rooms, also north facing with deep windows. They served as lecture rooms in the mornings and late afternoons. For the rest of the time, being lined with books, they were reading rooms. A third room of similar size reached back to the southeast.
The head of a Cambridge college once commented to the law dean that he thought the new law building to be "an admirable design for a petrol station" until he entered the main reading room. Thereupon the visitor’s impression was entirely transformed. He judged it to be a "magnificent Hall, one the best I have ever seen". E. A. Lucas, who had been a great fan of the early law huts, paid the highest compliment he could think of to the new, purpose-built law school ("now largely butchered" by subsequent construction according to Curtis). It was, he said, "a splendid dream . . . come true. The new Law Building is a glorified beautified hut!" Others thought equally highly of the 1951 law faculty building although, unlike the unnamed Cambridge visitor or Mr. Lucas, they did not feel compelled to draw such disparaging comparisons. Diana Priestly recalls the "big central reading room" as "a beautiful room with huge windows looked out to the sea. We could see the steamers coming back and forth from Victoria and the mountains beyond that, a beautiful room". Madam Justice Southin described "the first real new Law School" as "a very nice building for us . . . it was very nice".
To read more about the history of UBC Law as written by Professor Pue, you can access the illustrated on-line version at http://faculty.law.ubc.ca/Pue/historybook/ or the fully documented version can be found at http://ssrn.com/author=99873
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
We welcome all feedback on the building project. Please visit our Feedback page for contact information or contact the UBC Law Development Director at 604.827.5026.
