Cowboy Jurists & the Making of Legal Professionalism

This paper identifies the origins of modern Canadian legal professionalism in the prairie west during the early twentieth century, arguing for the importance of human agency and emphasizing contingency where others assert trans-historical processes. Lawyers combined agendas which were explicitly moral and reforming with a profound restructuring of their profession. Their efforts to reform the curriculum of formal legal education was part of a cultural project, but so too was their desire to attain self-regulation, monopoly, professional independence, and plenary disciplinary powers. The substantive findings documented here direct our attention to questions of cultural agency and structural revolution that are too easily overlooked. They suggest connections between market control, political lawyering, culture, liberalism and professionalism that have yet to be adequately explored

Cultural Projects and Structural Transformation in the Legal Profession

This paper explores the history of professional formation amongst lawyers, pointing to the surprising conclusions that contemporary legal professionalism bears little continuity with supposed roots in British professionalism and that one of the major motors driving professionalism was related to a project of cultural transformation in state and society at large. Whilst legal professions appear exclusionary and xenophobic from an outside perspective, the desire to control difference has deeper, more fully cultural roots, than arguments from self-interest per se might suggest

Banned from Lawyering: Gordon Martin, Communist

This paper assesses the exclusion of Gordon Martin from the practice of law in 1948 solely on the grounds that his communist political commitment was inconsistent with the role of a lawyer. In so doing it canvasses understandings of the day regarding communism, constitutionalism, and American social thought (as embodied in Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen). Issues relating to self-governance of the legal profession, character, and statutory interpretation under then-current administrative law doctrine are reviewed

A History of British Columbia Legal Education

This paper explores the history of legal education in twentieth century British Columbia. The period covers the transition from qualification by apprenticeship to the foundation of Canada\u27s first post-WWII Faculty of Law - the beginning of modern legal education in Canada. Issues addressed include the moral vision of legal education, gender and the legal profession (the admission of women lawyers), race-based exclusions, the question of whether communists could be qualified as lawyers, and the evolution of legal curriculum from the age of moral reform to the era of narrowly technocratic notions of legal knowledge

In Pursuit of Better Myth: Lawyers\u27 Histories and Histories of Lawyers

This paper explores the mythologies contemporary lawyers generate in defence of existing professional structures. Drawing on the history of legal professions, the paper engages critically with professional apologetics, from a perspective influenced by diverse contemporary writings on legal professions including those associated with Richard Abel, Terrence Halliday, and others

The Prime Minister\u27s Police? Commissioner Hughes\u27 APEC Report

On 31 July 2001, a distinguished Canadian jurist reported on matters of unusual significance. Sitting as a Member of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP (CPC), Mr. Justice E.N. Hughes dealt with matters that go to the heart of liberal democracy. Any investigation of alleged police misconduct is important, of course, to a country that wishes to be governed in accordance with fundamental principles of the rule of law. This is so even in the seemingly most inconsequential instances. Important principles are involved even where small matters are concerned. The matters before Commissioner Hughes on this occasion however raise a number of large issues that only rarely come before formal inquiries. The matter known in Canada as the APEC affair, and Commissioner Hughes\u27 APEC report ( Hughes Report ) focus on allegations of wrongdoing by the police and the Prime Minister of Canada at the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Conference held in Vancouver in November 1997. The particular allegations, which have dominated the House of Commons and Canadian political life on several occasions, will be addressed in a moment. First, however, it is worth pausing briefly to consider some fundamental principles concerning police and politicians

Book Review: Martin Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902-1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice

This review of Martin Chanock\u27s work on South African legal culture, locates the work in the context of international scholarship on law and society, legal history, and law and colonialism. It appeared in 18:1 Canadian Journal of Law & Society, 177-181

Book Review of A Radical Lawyer in Victorian England: W. P. Roberts and the Struggle for Workers\u27 Rights by Raymond Challinor

This essay assesses the history of one of Britain\u27s most important lawyers for the working class through a critical review of Raymond Challinor\u27s ground-breaking work. The life of W. P. Roberts spanned crucial decades of the nineteenth Century. Admitted to the lower branch of the legal profession in Bath in 1827 W. P. Roberts converted from Toryism in the first decade of his professional life to emerge as a leading figure in the Bath Working Men\u27s Association by 1837. Apparently motivated by a deeply-held Christian belief in an essential human dignity, Roberts\u27 consistently employed the law as a shield in the defence of working people, a platform from which to denounce injustice, a prod with which to encourage collective action, and a weapon with which to bludgeon the perpetrators of injustice. Variously he was a local activist in Bath and Wiltshire (1837-), delegate to Chartist conventions, political prisoner, solicitor to Karl Marx, lawyer for the Northumberland and Durham miners\u27 county unions (1843), and lawyer for the Lancashire Miner\u27s Association (1845-)

Educating the Total Jurist?

This paper discusses a discontinuity between the ways in which legal education has historically sought to reconstruct the soul of lawyers-in-training and the contemporary conceit that legal education can be value-free. It identifies a gap between early 21st century narrowly technocratic approaches to legal professionalism - epitomized by Enron professionalism and earlier conceptions of lawyering. A desire to instill a moral sensibility in apprentice lawyers weighed heavily in an earlier generation\u27s thinking about legal education everywhere in the common law world, giving rise to the programmes, schemes, and imaginings that provided templates for contemporary university legal training. With surprising consistency, law teachers have sought to devise pedagogical strategies aimed at constituting or remaking the entire human subject - constructing, as it were, a total jurist. They have done so in order to advance good for its own sake, but also to protect against the mere half-lawyer

Criminal Jumping On and Off the Curb - Discretion and the Idea of an Impartial and Independent Police Force

This paper presents a commentary on the idea of independence of the police, arguing that notions of independence are complicated considerably when the reality of police discretion is taken into account. The notion of colourability is identified as central (where goals not unlawful in themselves are pursued for unlawful reasons - eg. to vicitimize one\u27s political foes) as is the possibility of police powers being deployed lawfully in the strict sense, but in a fashion that is nonetheless constitutionally improper