Schulich School of Law

The Schulich School of Law is a faculty of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Formerly called Dalhousie Law School, it was established in 1883, making it the oldest university common law school in the British Commonwealth. It is the largest law school in Atlantic Canada and attracts students from all parts of Canada and abroad. The law school is a member of the North American Consortium on Legal Education. The school was renamed the Schulich School of Law in October 2009 after receiving a $20 million benefaction from Canadian businessman and philanthropist Seymour Schulich.HistoryDalhousie Law School lays claim to being "the first university-based common law school in the Commonwealth." Unlike Ontario's Osgoode Hall, which was first established in 1862 under the auspices of the Law Society of Upper Canada and subsequently shut down several times before re-opening in 1889, Dalhousie Law School sought to treat the study of law as a liberal education. It was not, as Osgoode was, an outpost for the province's professional law society where the law was "merely a technical craft." In fact, at that time the establishment of a full-time professional university common law school was so radical and the School's influence so great that legal historians cite Dalhousie Law School's founding as the beginning of the first period of common law education in Canada that laid the basis for law school as it is known today.