Lords of the Western Bench: A Biographical History of the Supreme and District Courts of Alberta, 1876-1990

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Starting from scratch to compile the legal biographies of the 187
federally appointed judges of Alberta since 1876 in a way that will
enable us to see them “as real persons dealing with real issues” is
a daunting task. The only comparable contemporary work in Canadian legal
history is a collection of 70 longer entries on lawyers and judges from
Ontario, reprinted from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography in 1992.
Lords of the Western Bench does not achieve the ambitious aims of its
compilers, but it is an impressive start.

Especially to be commended is the effort to go beyond the biographical
facts of birth, education, legal practice, and, in some cases, social
and political activities, to an analysis of leading decisions rendered
by these judges. However, the entries fail to make causal connections
between judgments delivered from the bench and the judges’ earlier
personal and professional experience. In part, this gap is a function of
space. With only 140 pages of biographical text, many judges receive
short shrift. Of the ten female entries, one, appointed in 1984,
receives only three sentences, while no attention is paid the decisions
of some judges.

The introduction, written by Louis Knafla, is lively. The entries
themselves require greater depth, which may come with further research.
In one of the fullest profiles, that of William Morrow, best known as
judge of the Northwest Territories between 1966 and 1976, there is no
mention of his confrontation with the Trudeau government in its
successful application to prevent Morrow from deciding the merits of a
caveat filed by aboriginals serving notice of their claim to 350,000
square miles of the western Arctic.

Of greater concern is the air of discretion in these entries. There is
no mention of alcoholism, the bane of the legal profession. No
explanation is offered for the sudden resignation of Stevenson from the
Supreme Court of Canada after only two years in 1992, although in
Alberta during the 1980s his “judgments dominate[d] the pages of the
law reports.” One solution could be to add an extensive introduction
that establishes the historical context in which lawyers trained,
practised, and judged. For example, law-school curricula in the late
1940s were very different from those of the 1980s, to say nothing of the
apprenticeship system of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The same can
be said for areas of practice that are constantly evolving. In short, if
the commendable aims of this project are to be realized, a way must be
found to turn what is essentially a biographical dictionary into a
biographical history.