The Faculty of Laws of the University of Malta marks its foundation day on Wednesday. Raymond Mangion, head of the faculty’s Department of Legal History and Methodology, traces its history.

The Universitas Studiorum, the present University of Malta, was founded by Gran Master Emmanuele Pinto de Fonseca by virtue of a decree signed on November 22, 1769. It was located within the College of the Company of Jesus in Valletta.

The Jesuits in Malta had promoted and conducted the island’s Collegium Melitense that had catered for ‘tertiary’ education since 1592.

The curriculum that focused on the lecturing and learning of canon and civil laws was very modest in comparison with later and present course of studies.

In 1838, Ignazio Gavino Bonavita drew up a statuto fondamentale on the strength of recommendations made by royal commissioners John Austin and George Cornewall Lewis and on instructions from London. The publication of the statute on December 15 of the year laid the basis of the future athenaeum of the country.

Governor Sir Henry Bouverie informed the rector of the University by a missive dated December 17, 1838 that the Consiglio Speciale della Facoltá di Legge was instituted. Bouverie had set up the present Faculty of Laws of the University of Malta.

The course of laws was one of four consiglii speciali restructured to encompass lessons in the municipal institutions and in natural, common, civil and criminal laws.

A chair of international and constitutional law was created to mark the introduction of the professorship and teaching of international law, an unprecedented hallmark in the records of the law studies within the groves of academe.

The special council or Faculty of Laws held its first sitting on December 24, 1838 in the edifice of the University at Valletta.

On July 19, 1839, the first conferment of degrees by the faculty was made.

The foundation date of the present Faculty of Laws marked the beginning of an institution that was set and ready to move with the winds of change and respond to them from time to time. In 1870, a quantum leap was made when the subject of history of legislation in England and Malta was introduced owing to the underlying relevance that the study of the foundations of the law had to the legislative system of the island.

The compilation and digest of the substantive, penal and procedural criminal laws, the substantive and procedural civil laws, the substantive commercial law and the police laws of Malta had been finalised by the time. The need to research and lecture on the sources of such massive codification and quasi-codification was inevitable.

In 1923, a new branch of learning was included that focused on fiscal laws, statistics and administration, a wise decision in view of the takeover by the local government of the so-called ‘transferred matters’, particularly of finance, pursuant to the bestowal of responsible government in Malta.

Two years later, Sir George Borg insisted by way of an article in the journal Melita on the dire need of teaching Roman law as an autonomous subject because it laid “the basis and framework of European legislation”. The existing departments were multiplied by the separation of Roman law from civil law and the dismemberment of constitutional law from international law.

As with international law, the incumbent from 1948 to 1987 was first a lecturer without the rank of professor and afterwards with such a grade when the subject was re-incorporated within a new chair under the nomenclature of public law in 1962.

No doubt, the Faculty of Laws at the University of Malta secured an important milestone along its more recent itinerary by introducing the department of European and comparative law by establishing the syllabus and exams on European law in 1991.

It was a fitting determination in the light of the contemporaneous creation of the European Union coupled with the domestic government’s firmness to lead Malta into full membership of the new economic and political grouping.

The Faculty of Laws braced itself once again to live up to its expectations by seeing to it that its curriculum of studies was brought au courant with the institutional breakthroughs that were transpiring within the EU, the rest of Europe and beyond.

The story of the ‘modern’ or present Faculty of Laws at the University is a formidable and admirable watershed in the annals of Maltese academic history.