History of the Faculty

The history of the Faculty of Law at the University of Barcelona is intimately bound up with the history of the University and of the Catalan society, institutions and businesses which it serves.  From its very foundation in 1450, the Estudi General de Barcelona (the first name of the present-day University of Barcelona) offered legal education on common and civil law as well as canon and ecclesiastical law.  The disciplines, which enjoyed a variety of homes as a result of the city’s growth, excited the attention of well-to-do Barcelona residents with an eye to pursuing careers in the law courts, in public and academic institutions and as advisors to governing bodies.  In 1717, as a consequence of Catalonia’s support for Archduke Charles of Austria in the Spanish War of Succession, the Estudi General was closed and moved to Cervera and it would not return to Barcelona until 1842.  In the subsequent period, the Moyano Plan (Royal Decree 17/09/1845) added political administration as a third branch of law studies.  Shortly afterwards, the Law of 19 September 1957 became the first law to refer to our faculty by the name Faculty of Law.  In 1928, the Callejo Plan set the length of the degree at five years and suppressed “cultural” subjects, leaving Economics as the only subject unrelated to Law.  After the Spanish Civil War, the decrees of 1944 and, in particular, the Curriculum of 1953 established the contents and teaching methodology by which several generations of Catalan lawyers were to receive instruction.

From the late 1980s and early 1990s, the educational offering at the Faculty of Law has undergone two developments.  On the one hand, the curriculum has been updated after following the 1953 plan for forty years.  The current curriculum, adopted in 1992, structures the degree into five years and two cycles, with compulsory, optional and free-elective subjects.  On the other hand, new undergraduate disciplines have joined the Faculty, expanding the educational offering so that today it covers not only the undergraduate degree in Law, but also second-cycle degrees in Political Sciences and Labour Sciences, diplomas in Public Management and Administration, and UB-endorsed degrees in Criminology and Criminal Policy and in Private Investigation.  In addition, a wide range of postgraduate courses are available through the Faculty, as well as two doctoral programs (Political Sciences and Law, with the latter structured in several specialities).

Today’s Faculty of Law, located in Diagonal Avenue, was built in 1958.  In that same year, it became the very first recipient of the FAD award.  At that time, the Faculty had only ten classrooms and roughly 200 students in the first year.  Twenty years later, the number of new students had grown roughly by a factor of ten.  Nonetheless, the Faculty did not have additional space until the 1982-83 academic year, when the former school the Col·legi Major Universitari Ilerdense student hall of residence was added.  The growth in enrolment, which had reached 13,000 students by the early nineties, made it necessary to construct a third building (the Tomás y Valiente Building), which was opened in February 1996.  Even with these improvements, lack of space still requires some disciplines affiliated with the Faculty to use other facilities.  As a result, consideration is now being given to the replacement of the Ilerdense Building with a new more spacious, more efficient facility to make room at the Faculty for students in Political Sciences, Public Management and Administration, and Industrial Relations.