Schulich School of Law

The Schulich School of Law is the law school of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Founded in 1883 as Dalhousie Law School, it is the oldest university-based common law school in Canada. It adopted its current name in October 2009 after receiving a $20-million endowment from Canadian businessman and philanthropist Seymour Schulich. Today, the Schulich School of Law is the largest law school in Atlantic Canada. With 500 students enrolled each year (170 in first-year) and a faculty of Rhodes, Fulbright, and Trudeau scholars, the school promises “one of the most prestigious and comprehensive legal educations in North America.” Located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a maritime city on the east coast of Canada, the Schulich School of Law is rooted in the vision of its first dean, Richard Chapman Weldon, who believed lawyers had a responsibility to contribute to their communities' well-being. Unlike his contemporaries at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University (which was established in 1862 under the auspices of the Law Society of Upper Canada), Weldon aspired to treat the study of law as a full-time, liberal education. It was not, as Osgoode was, an outpost for the province's professional law society where law was seen as "merely a technical craft." At the time of its founding, the establishment of a university common law school was so radical – and its subsequent influence so great – that legal historians cite Dal Law as the basis for law school today. In W. Wesley Pue's Story of Legal Education in British Columbia, a book that chronicles the establishment of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law 62 years after Dalhousie Law School first opened, Pue notes that: "Dalhousie" serves as a sort of code-word among legal educators in Canada, much as "Harvard" does in the United States of America. It invokes a vision of intellectually ambitious, rigorous, and scholarly approaches to education for the profession of law.