Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Raphael “Bora” Laskin, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in
1912, in Fort William, Thunder Bay, and educated at the University of
Toronto, Osgoode Hall Law School, and Harvard. In 1940, he became a law
professor at the U of T; while there, he branched out as university
committee chair, CAUT fact finder, and later CAUT president, all the
while carrying a heavy load as an author, labour arbitrator, and Jewish
activist. He was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1965 and to
the Supreme Court in 1970; he became Chief Justice in late 1973.

Throughout his career, Laskin was driven by what Girard, a law
professor at Dalhousie University, calls “legal modernism,” which is
to say “ensuring that human needs and aspirations shaped the domain of
law, rather than requiring human experience to squeeze into the
pigeonholes of legal doctrine.” His mentors, W.P.M. Kennedy of the U
of T and Cecil Wright of Osgoode Hall Law School, spoke of “bringing
law to life” rather than “life to the law,” hence the
appropriateness of the book’s title.

Laskin’s contributions extended to all the fields he touched. For
example, he helped shape the structure of graduate studies at the U of
T, the meaning of academic freedom in Canada, and the extension of human
rights in this country (although not as much for women). He was a
champion of the arbitration system, opposing as a general rule court
overrides of arbitrators’ decisions, except on procedural grounds. As
a judge, he symbolized the trend of appointments based on merit rather
than political connections, and he was as famous for his dissents as for
his judgments.

Girard’s splendidly researched, balanced, and clearly written
biography makes the case that whether one looks “with approval or
regret on the emergence of the judiciary as a major actor in Canadian
political and social life in the wake of the Charter, Laskin’s role in
that historic transformation cannot be denied.”