This year, Allard Law Professor Dennis Pavlich celebrates 50 years of service at UBC.
Professor Pavlich was honoured by UBC President Benoit-Antoine Bacon with UBC’s long-service award at a special ceremony on October 20, 2025. Here, he shares some reflections on his remarkable career at UBC.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your path to becoming a law professor.
I grew up on my parents’ and grandparents’ respective farms in Zimbabwe. Though I was sent to a private boarding school in Harare (then Salisbury) at age 9, school holidays are a blissful memory of supervising the very early morning milking session of our modern, mechanized dairy operation.
My experience tending to sick animals and helping deliver calves led me to want to become a vet, but on graduating high school with “A levels,” I changed course. I read arts and law degrees at Witwatersrand University and Yale. At “Wits” I met Suzanne, the girl of my dreams, in law school – one of five women in our cohort. We married and have been together for nearly 55 years, raising three children along the way.
What initially brought you to UBC?
I did articles in Johannesburg, hated legal practice and accepted a position as a law lecturer at Wits. Shortly thereafter, Suzanne and I decided to bid apartheid South Africa adieu on the birth of our first child and made tracks for North America with entrance at Yale Law School.
There I was extremely fortunate to meet a couple of Canadians who extolled the beauty of both Vancouver and UBC and persuaded us that the frozen north would provide better immigration prospects. Our decision is one we have never regretted. Suzanne and I still celebrate our good fortune of winding up in Vancouver and at UBC – 50 years later.
You’ve received a number of teaching awards over the course of your career, including UBC’s Killam Teaching Prize and the Faculty of Law’s George Curtis Teaching Award. What do you love about teaching?
The students – every one of them. I now have had students in my class who are children of graduates in my early classes. How remarkable would it be to have the opportunity to teach one of their grandchildren?
What’s changed the most over the past 50 years? Is there anything you miss from when you began at the law school?
I miss the collegiality of almost daily, very casual meetings by faculty in the inner sanctum of the old library to read and discuss the latest cases in the law reports and journal articles. Initial access to these “hot off the press” writings could only, until the reign of the internet, be accessed in the Faculty Room of the library.
What have been the biggest highlights so far of your time at UBC?
My years at UBC have been rich and varied. After teaching for a few years, I left the law school temporarily to serve in the central offices of UBC as University Counsel and then, later, Vice President External and Legal Affairs, serving under the three presidents: Strangway, Piper and Toope. I enjoyed those 14 years spent in the admittedly very exciting, changing front office of UBC!
I returned to Allard Law to teach under the leadership of outstanding deans such as Mary-Ann Bobinski and Ngai Pindell, both of whom have worked to increase diversity and inclusivity at the law school in ways that would have been almost unimaginable when I arrived 50 years ago. In being a part and one of the (quiet) leaders in that process, I take great pride.
