Aggressive in Pursuit: The Life of Justice Emmett Hall

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland. He is the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Only three of the eight substantive chapters in this judicial biography
examine Supreme Court judge Emmett Hall’s legal career. This
allocation may disappoint legal junkies, but it indicates several
variations in one lawyer’s career that are of interest.

First, Hall owed to John Diefenbaker his appointment to the bench and
rapid ascent from his position of chief justice of the Supreme Court of
Saskatchewan, to its court of appeal, to the Supreme Court of Canada
(1962–73). And, like Diefenbaker, he was a criminal defence lawyer.
His guiding principle was to do justice, by his own lights, an approach
that led him to attempt, on occasion, to make new law. The upside is
that his critical and biting dissent (a minority of one in a nine-man
court) in the Stephen Truscott Reference of 1966 will surely turn out to
have been prescient, challenging as it did a wrongful conviction that is
now of almost 40 years’ standing. The little man caught up in the web
of the criminal justice system or of bureaucracy, children, the ill, and
Aboriginals—all were special objects of his attention and passion.

Hall’s relatively brief judicial career (15 years) was interrupted
for years at a time when he was on leave (in the first instance again at
the behest of Prime Minister Diefenbaker) on various royal commissions
to investigate and report on issues of public policy. The best known,
and what he will be chiefly remembered for, is his five-year inquiry
(1961–5) that led to the establishment of Canada’s system of
universal health care. Further secondments concerned featherbedding on
the railways; the closure of railway branch lines in the West; the
emergence of the University of Regina as a degree-granting institution;
and the Hall–Dennis commission (1965–8), which turned upside down
the guiding principles and curriculum of education in Ontario. Its final
report, Living and Learning, is an easy target with which the author has
considerable sport. Vaughan notes that Hall enjoyed the publicity,
attention, and perquisites that flowed from these extrajudicial
activities. But his frequent and sustained absences from the bench
privately attracted criticism from his fellow judges, which Hall’s
demeanour (characterized here as aggressive) probably did nothing to
alleviate. Vaughan’s view that Bora Laskin was the fellow justice to
whom he was closest in his later years on the bench must await the
imminent publication of a biography of that other judicial loner.