Academic law at the mid-20th century was a fledgling, uncertain of its place in relation to the profession and still finding its research legs. The institutional and political milieu of postwar Melbourne provided a fertile seedbed for those willing and able to shape the future of legal education and promote a vision of its relevance to a changing society. Exploring these propositions through a consideration of the lives of three leading figures in the Melbourne Law School in the 1950s, Sir Zelman Cowen, Norval Morris and Sir John Vincent Barry, this paper considers their academic, political and writing lives as the practice of a strong sense of vocation, of intellectual vocation, noteworthy for its intense engagement with the world beyond the university.