Marking 60 years of the LLB at Glasgow

Marking 60 years of the LLB at Glasgow

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the LLB programme at the University of Glasgow. 

The new LLB signalled a commitment to the advanced teaching of law within the University, providing a ‘full-time degree and provision for Honours study within the Faculty of Law’ (David M Walker, A History of the School of Law, 1990, 73). Prior to this, candidates who wished to practise law first obtained an MA degree, then undertook the BL as a part-time vocational qualification.  

Under the old model, lectures took place in the evening, which allowed students to undertake a full-time apprenticeship in a law office concurrently with study. These classes took place on-site on solicitor premises. Alumna Esmee Shapiro, who started the BL in 1950, recalls that Roman Law was taught at the Procurator Fiscal’s offices in Nelson Mandela Place (at that time St George’s Place). Public Law classes were held in buildings situated on what is now the Strathclyde University campus.  

When the LLB commenced in 1961, teaching moved to the Gilmorehill campus and the University ‘allocated a pair of old Victorian houses at 61-63 Hillhead St as a temporary home for the Faculty’ (Walker, 77). This included a designated Law Library and a Law Librarian seconded from the Main Library, allowing students greater opportunity to read cases and textbooks beyond what was prescribed reading. 

Alumnus Adrian W Ward recalls ‘lectures were delivered either within the quadrangles, or in the Law Building in Hillhead Street. Those first two were in the east quadrangle, the room closest to the tower, then the one next to it. Civil law lectures were delivered in the west quadrangle’. It would be some time before the Faculty of Law would finds its current home in Professor Square. 

Perhaps more significantly, for the first time, law students were full-time students, with apprenticeships starting after graduation. This facilitated, Mrs Shapiro suggests, better integration into student life for new students of the LLB, who now felt part of the university.  (Full-time students were also eligible for student grants, unlike their part-time peers.) 

The strong link to the vocation, however, was preserved. As Mr Ward remembers, ‘most lecturers were also practitioners, lecturing at the beginning or end of their working days, so that after [the] first lecture in private law we returned at 5.00pm for our second, on constitutional law and history. That 9.00am session [on 5 October 1961] began with an introduction by Professor David M Walker in his daunting prime, followed by a (very) young and earnest Michael C Meston, soon to apply his talents on “the new Act” – the Succession (Scotland) Act 1964.’   

At the time, Mr Wards recalls, ‘over 90% of that first intake were male: a challenge for the small but determined group of women, who in their subsequent careers rose splendidly to that challenge.’ One of those women was Mrs Shapiro, who returned to her studies in 1963 after a lengthy break to raise her young family. She would go on to become a Lecturer at the School of Law, retiring in 1992. You can read her story as part of the ‘First 100 Years’ of Women in Law project at: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/law/100years/100voices/esmee-shapiro/  

The new degree programme ‘proved an outstanding success from the very start’ (Walker, 87). Numbers jumped from 40 in the final year under old regulations to 114 in the first year of the LLB degree being offered. With an expanded timetable came opportunities for the advanced teaching and study of law. Major innovations included the development of Criminal Law as a course and the teaching of Scots Law spread over two sessions, with provision made for an Honours LLB ‘specialising in Civil Law or Jurisprudence, or Private Law’ (Walker, 87). 

The establishment of the LLB at Glasgow was, in the words of Professor D M Walker, ‘the biggest revolution in legal studies since the creation of LLB by the 1858 Act’ (77). In addition to providing a more thorough legal education for future practitioners, it would also pave the way for the development of an academic research culture that had not been possible under the old system with its vocational focus. 

Thank you to LLB alumni Mrs Esmee Shapiro and Mr Adrian W Ward for sharing their reflections on their experience of the LLB in the early 1960s for this article. 

Books cited: 

A History of the School of Law: The University of Glasgow, David M. Walker (1990) 

100 Years of Women in Law - Creative Workshop Series

100 Years of Women in Law - Creative Workshop Series

Researcher Development Programme Interns join Legal Studies in Schools Project

Researcher Development Programme Interns join Legal Studies in Schools Project