Tracings of Gerald Le Dain's Life in the Law

G. Blaine Baker, Richard Janda, G. Blaine Baker, Richard Janda

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780773555181
• eBook ISBN: 9780773556195
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Biographies
• Index: Law

Gerald Le Dain (1924-2007) was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1984. This collectively written biography traces fifty years of his steady, creative, and conciliatory involvement with military service, the legal academy, legislative reform, university administration, and judicial decision-making.

This book assembles contributions from the in-house historian of the law firm where Le Dain first practised, from students and colleagues in the law schools where he taught, from a research associate in his Commission of Inquiry into the non-medical use of drugs, from two of his successors on the Federal Court of Appeal, and from three judicial clerks to Le Dain at the Supreme Court of Canada. Also reproduced here is a transcript of a recent CBC documentary about his 1988 forced resignation from the Supreme Court following a short-term depressive illness, with commentary from Le Dain’s family and co-workers.

Gerald Le Dain was a tireless worker and a highly respected judge. In a series of essays that cover the different periods and dimensions of his career, Tracings of Gerald Le Dain’s Life in the Law is an important and compassionate account of one man's commitment to the law in Canada.

Contributors include Harry W. Arthurs, G. Blaine Baker, Bonnie Brown, Rosemary Cairns-Way, John M. Evans, Melvyn Green, Bernard J. Hibbitts, Peter W. Hogg, Richard A. Janda, C. Ian Kyer, Andree Lajoie, Gerald E. Le Dain, Allen M. Linden, Roderick A. Macdonald, Louise Rolland, and Stephen A. Scott.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Juristic Biographies, Homage Volumes, and “Tracings of Gerald Le Dain’s Life in the Law”
• 2 University Boot Camp and World War II Army Service
• 3 The Walker, Martineau Years, 1950–1953
• 4 Part-time Montreal Law Practice and Part-time Law School Lecturing of the 1950s and 1960s
• 5 Le Dain and Legal Education: A Tale of Two Cities
• 6 The Tree of Knowledge, the Axe of Power: Le Dain and the Transformation of Canadian Legal Education
• 7 An Accidental Soldier in the War against the War on Drugs
• 8 Pleading Public Law Issues in the Barfried Enterprises Case
• 9 The Federal Court Years, 1975–1984
• 10 Crown Zellerbach: Bringing Clarity to National Concern
• 11 Constitutional Transitions: Le Dain’s Approach to Jurisdiction over the Environment
• 12 Gerald Le Dain : Sur la société libre et démocratique
• 13 Judicial Opinion Writing
• 14 Engaged Professionalism
• 15 À “One Judge Down”
• 16 Cases Argued, Cases Decided, and Scholarly Writing of Gerald Le Dain
• Postface
• Contributors
• Index