Renegade Lawyer: The Life of JL Cohen

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

This biography of a talented complex outsider—Canada’s most
prominent labor lawyer by 1945—reminds us that the labor-relations
regime we take for granted (i.e., labor standards legislation for
nonunionized workers and collective bargaining legislation for union
members) is less than 60 years old. MacDowell provides a sympathetic but
not uncritical reading of the career of Toronto lawyer J.L. Cohen
(1897–1950) as he confronted the resistance of employers and the
provincial and federal governments, and as he publicized and helped to
frame the new regime. In Central Canada between 1925 and 1945, there was
hardly an industrial strike, campaign for union recognition, or trial in
defence of free speech or freedom of association in which Cohen was not
a committed advocate.

He was the son of working-class immigrant Lithuanian-Jewish parents and
at 13 became breadwinner for a family of seven; he was a loner, a
workaholic, and abused alcohol and drugs (he had a prolonged nervous
breakdown around 1925). Brilliant, arrogant, abrasive, outspoken and
introverted, distant even from his wife and daughter, he saw his star
rise and almost as suddenly fall at the end of World War II when he was
convicted of assaulting a female employee, incarcerated, and disbarred.
Since the law was his life, and although he won reinstatement in 1950,
his career was beyond recovery and he died within months, “an
authentic tragic figure—the exceptional man with great talents whose
flaws became his undoing.”

MacDowell is an informed and even-handed guide to Cohen and the legal
issues he engaged. Cohen’s undoing was partly a result of his
upbringing and the discrimination he faced. When he was most in need of
powerful friends, in 1945–46, he had none. Especially interesting is
MacDowell’s tentative reconstruction of the nature, expectations, and
limitations of working- and middle-class masculinity during Cohen’s
era. She is more outspoken, but surely sound, in taking to task
present-day commentators who argue that the labor-relations regime Cohen
helped frame has co-opted and compromised the labor movement. She
dismisses this debate over “the postwar [labor-relations]
settlement” as anti-historical, based on present norms and a
misreading of the past. Fully researched and cogently argued, this study
is likely to be definitive.