Back to the Beginning: An Interview with Doug Shatford
- Kimberly Gilson
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read

In 1914, Dean Richard Chapman Weldon resigned, ending thirty-one years as Law School Dean at Dalhousie University. Few students know the Weldon Law Building’s namesake, but his legacy continues to echo through our halls through the Weldon Tradition of unselfish public service and, of course, The Weldon Times. The latter was founded in 1975 – or so we thought.
Until last year, the thick fog of time enshrouded The Weldon Times’ beginning. A light pierced through, and that light was Doug Shatford. He reached out, we were dazzled, and he (quite humbly) allowed me to interview him on his experience, the law school, and our publication’s origin.
When we first connected, you mentioned you and your classmates were the first to pitch The Weldon Times; what was that like, and what was the catalyst for starting a newspaper at the law school?
I think we started The Weldon Times during my first year, and the person who we dealt with at the time was the Associate Dean of the law school, Murray Fraser. A group of us were interested in having a student newspaper, or way to communicate of some sort, because we were the first group that had what I’ll call the “enlarged law school class.” One hundred and fifty students started that year, and that was bigger than any class before us; One hundred and fifty versus one hundred from a couple years before.
We were broken into three sections: A, B, and C. Often, if you were in Section C, you wouldn’t have much to do with people in Sections A and B. We were Section C, and there was a group of us who sort of said, “Well, you know, how do we figure out what’s going on here?” There’s a hundred other students who we don’t see or hear from – and then there’s the second and third years.
We went to Associate Dean Fraser and asked, “Do you think this is something the faculty or school would support?” He thought it was a good idea. He offered to let us use some staff and equipment they had: one of the things I sent to you was a copy of the receipts we had from the typist and the copier. The [law student’s] council had a meeting. They set aside $50.00 for The Weldon Times, so we could produce these first versions of the newspaper.


After that, the four of us approached the Dean – and I don’t have a copy of the original first edition, but I recall it was breaking news. Associate Dean Murray Fraser was leaving Dalhousie Law School and going to the University of Victoria, where they were starting a new law school. He’d be Dean there. That was the first story we broke.
As a side note, fifty years later at our class reunion, Dean Fraser’s wife was the guest of honour, and our law class set up a bursary award in ethics in his honour. As a group, we were really friendly with Murray Fraser, and he kept in touch with just about every student that was there, individually and collectively. He was a really outstanding Dean, and our class was very lucky to have him around. You know, he was the sort of person who would help us start a student newspaper.
A wonderful origin! There’s still some struggles with class sections feeling disconnected, and our class sizes are still growing. Diving into your time though, so The Weldon Times began in 1972, your first year of law school, how did your involvement with the newspaper affect your time at school?
Well, people knew we were doing it. Fortunately, the relationship between both the faculty and the students was a venue in which these communiqués could be exchanged. Some students volunteered to write articles, and aside from the editorial group that initiated this, if the faculty wanted to say something interesting, they’d let us know and we’d put together an issue. For me, I helped put it together with administrative tasks: communicating with the typist, with the gestetner operator to get volumes out, and paying for things. It was just volunteering my time. It was just something I did. It didn’t have a profound impact on me, but I knew that after we left law school, The Weldon Times was still going on. It was only at this class reunion when a former professor, Professor Kindred, had copies of the later editions, and I thought, “I’ve got something I can tell people about.”
When we first started though, I was writing articles, too. I never studied journalism or had been a reporter – but one of the students there had actually worked for a newspaper as a reporter. He took me aside, and I can’t recall his name, but he basically taught me how to write a newspaper article. Paragraphs should be one sentence, if at all, and no more than two. Like in today’s world, you had to tweet it in 160 characters. So, you wrote articles’ headline first, one to two sentences, describing what the impact was, and you went from there. That’s what I learned from The Weldon Times, the basics of being a journalist, communicating, and all the rest of it.
That’s fantastic. Do you think those sorts of teachings, on framing articles and being succinct in writing, were effective skills to develop before you began your litigation career?
Yeah, definitely. Getting in and out fast, making your point, getting the big headline. Those lessons carry on into your legal writing and all the rest of it. In particular, when you open a lot of factums for the Court of Appeal, or even craft briefings for trials in the Supreme Court, for example, it’s not really a journalistic format. However, it’s important to hear the facts, see the issues, and be able to communicate them in one or two sentences. Just like a newspaper article, you write those couple sentences for the issue, the law, the argument, and then the next thirty pages just explain those two sentences. So, yeah, I think it had an actual impact.
Learning how to do that in law school and through association with The Weldon Times, it helped. I could be more succinct in how I address issues or, later on, how I approached being a Small Claims Court adjudicator. When I was on the Discipline Committees of the Bar Society and chaired panels, you had to write decisions. Just like when I was writing an article fifty years ago, I took that same approach.
That’s lovely, and speaking of those headlines, I’ve been through some archives we have and the ones that you sent over; some of the articles are more academic or news adjacent, but some seem to be more akin to internal politics at the school [transcribed on the next page]. There’s one piece you oversaw, which pits the “lovers” in the school against the “ne’er do wells.” What came of that?
It was called, “Giddyup.” That particular article was in, I think, volume five. We printed the actual handwritten letter that had been submitted anonymously. Putting it into context, volume four of The Weldon Times talked a lot about the mock parliament we had; it was a disaster. Students were upset about the performance of those involved, and there was discussion in the paper of getting rid of [the mock parliament] and how people didn’t understand its history. Then this letter suddenly arrived in our suggestions box in the library.
I thought, “What is this? What do I do with it? Should I publish it or throw it in the waste paper basket?” After showing it to a few others, we decided to publish it and show some folks who could respond in additional articles. It was weird but also interesting because it identifies what the culture at the law school was like at the time. If you read the third letter, you know what was going on. There seemed to be a class of yahoos in third year who went to stag movies, drank, and you know, did everything horrible you could imagine. Then, there was this group in the middle, and some were like that, and then there were the first years. Obviously this [writer] was somebody in first year who was one of these born-again radicals, and it really reflects what was happening at the law school on the ground.
We were just through the sixties, with protests surrounding the women’s movement and race relations – people breaking ground in law. There were people in our year, and the year before, who actually participated in a lot of those protests. And then there were people in the third year who were like, just yahoos who were, let’s say, stuck in the sixties. This letter just exposed that culture clash, and it was interesting to see how people reacted to it. Some folks thought the letter writer didn’t have their head on straight, but others thought it was expressing serious concern about things at the law school. If nothing else, it created a lot of discussion. That was probably the most interesting article while I was there. I think that’s why I kept the [copies of that] paper so long. Other stories are lost in the fog of memory.
Original pages of the “Giddy Up” article in The Weldon Times, 1974. Gilson transcribes the ten-page, handwritten letter in the link below. The letter was followed by a rationale from Shatford and several responses from students.
Thank you for expanding on that article and debate at the school. With all of your experiences in mind, is there anything that you’d like to share with the current contributors to The Weldon Times?
I looked at a few of your editions, not just the most recent one, but some of your archives as well. You’re all doing a great job, and you’re far more sophisticated than we were. The stuff I really appreciate is the stories with an element of investigative journalism. You’re doing the same thing we did, which is like saying, “Hey, let’s talk to each other about what it’s like to be in first year and the hang-ups with the building – how we do things here.” Then there’s this whole other element of investigation that we didn’t have.
People always look to the hallmark of investigative journalism as Watergate. You know, when they investigated Nixon. When we were in law school, there was no Watergate. Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister. Richard Nixon had just won the 1972 election. That sort of journalism wasn’t around. All I’m saying is keep it up.
It's a good thing that you're doing it because you want to communicate with your fellow students and with your faculty about things that are happening on a day-to-day, weekly, or monthly basis: functions and what everybody's up to and what are their local interests. But the other side of it, which I'm really interested in seeing, is the investigative side of things. It’s not like a student legal journal. You're not really doing a legal thesis here, but you're getting people who are prepared to go out and take an issue, investigate it, and report on it and do it.
It’s like journalism but has the ability to transfer that to their legal writing and training. I think it’s excellent, you know.
After his time at The Weldon Times, Doug joined Milner Shatford & Creighton as a partner in 1981, was appointed as regional counsel of the Attorney General of Canada, and became an agent for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. Doug has practiced extensively in health law and litigation but has kept a general practice to service his community, Amherst, Nova Scotia. Doug B. Shatford, K.C. is now a Senior Partner at Creighton Shatford Lawyers & Notaries, and he celebrated his 50th Reunion with fellow 1974 LLB graduates last year.
As for Doug’s – and the maligned third years of 1974's – response to the “Giddy Up” article in 1974, we have them! It’s too long to publish those responses here, but if you would like to check them out, then email Kimberly Gilson at weldont@dal.ca.

Doug notes that many of the accompanying pictures in early copies of The Weldon Times are sourced from the work of Robert Crumb, a popular cartoonist in the sixties. The graphic on the left was put at the end of the April 1974 edition, following the response letters to “Giddy Up!”
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