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Richard Chapman Weldon, QC, was a lawyer, educator and politican. He was born in Sutton, New Brunswick, to Richard Weldon and Catherine Geldart. He received his BA and MA in political science from Mount Allison Wesleyan College before attending Yale College in New Haven, where he studied constitutional and international law and graduated with his doctorate in political science. For a short time he pursued further studies in law at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1875 he accepted a professorship in mathematics and political economy at Mount Allison, and by 1880 had apprenticed himself to a Sackville lawyer. He was called to the Nova Scotia bar shortly after being appointed dean of the newly formed Faculty of Law at Dalhousie University, where he also became the first full-time professor of law in post-confederation Canada (1883-1914). He served as a Conservative MP from 1887-1896, representing Albert, New Brunswick, where he owned land. Appointed a dominion QC in 1890, he acted as counsel to the firm of Harris, Henry, and Cahan from 1897.

Weldon married Sarah Maria Tuttle in 1877 in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, and they had four sons and one daughter. Shortly after Sarah's death in 1893 he married Louisa Frances Hare in Halifax, with whom he had seven children. He died in 1925 in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

In 2018 Richard Weldon was named one of 52 Dalhousie Originals, a list of individuals identified as having made a significant impact on the university and the broader community since Dalhousie's inception in 1818. https://www.dal.ca/about-dal/dalhousie-originals/richard-chapman-weldon.html

Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law originated as the first university law school established in the common-law provinces of Canada, and became the model for legal education across the country. The school was opened in 1883 with Richard Chapman Weldon as dean, supported by a volunteer faculty of Halifax lawyers and judges.

After four years in temporary housing, in 1887 the law school moved into a corner of the new Dalhousie College, known from 1919 as the Forrest Building. In 1951 the school moved to the Law Building (currently the University Club), which had been designed and built for the purpose thirty years earlier, but commandeered for other uses; by 1966 the law students and faculty had outgrown the space and moved into their current residence, the Weldon Law Building, named for the school’s first dean. After the fifth-floor library was destroyed by fire in 1985, the building was expanded and renovated to create the new James Dunn Law Library.

The Faculty of Law counts among its notable graduates Dalhousie’s first black graduate, James Robinson Johnston, who earned his law degree in 1898. In 1918 Frances Fish became the first woman to graduate from Dalhousie Law School and later the first woman to be admitted to the Barristers’ Society of Nova Scotia. By 1936 Dalhousie Law School graduates sat on the bench of all but three Provincial Supreme Courts, and in 1950 the faculty began offering graduate programs.

During the second half of the twentieth century the law school established initiatives and programs including Dalhousie Legal Aid (1970); the Marine and Environmental Law Program (1974); the Indigenous Blacks and Mi’kmaq Initiative (1989); the Health Law Institute (1992); and the Law and Technbology Institute (2001). In 2009 Sir Seymour Schulich donated $20 million to fund 40 new annual scholarships, the largest gift of its kind ever made to a Canadian law school, and the school was renamed the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

A $3 million gift from John McCall MacBain in 2011 established the MacBain Chair in Health Law and Policy, and Joanna Erdman was the first person to hold the chair.

The Dalhousie Student Union (DSU) has its roots in student-led associations dating from 1863 that provided services to and represented the interests of Dalhousie students. In 1899 the General Students’ Meeting became known as the University Students’ Council, continuing to organize social events, publish The Gazette (for which they had accepted ownership in 1869), and operate the reading room. By 1912 the council was also nominally in charge of student discipline and administering funds for student clubs and organizations.

By the late 1950s there was a movement to establish a permanent facility for student activities; in 1957 Dalhousie students voted $20,000 to establish a student union building fund, and in 1960 they voted in favour of a $10 fee increase to help pay for its construction. On 8 November 1968 the Student Union Building (SUB) was opened.

The Dalhousie Student Union has been associated with a number of larger student organizations, including the National Federation of Canadian University Students (later known as the Canadian Union of Students), the Atlantic Federation of Students, and the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations. The DSU is supported through student fees and revenues generated via food and other services, investments and contracts. The union’s executive and council are elected annually and have the authority to approve and implement budgets and expenditures on behalf of the student body.

The union represents students to external organizations and governments and is granted three seats on the Dalhousie Board of Governors and six seats on the Senate. By tradition, a member of the executive takes one of these seats, while the remainder are filled by elected students, each of whom who also holds a seat on the DSU Council.

As part of its mandate the DSU supports and funds over 250 student societies and hosts numerous events, campaigns and programs. It facilitates services such as health and dental plans, student legal counsel and student advocacy, and employs and manages both full- and part-time staff to operate the SUB, the campus bar, research, communications and reservations for building facilities.