Justice Ivan Rand and the role of a judge in the nation's highest court.

• Author: Bushnell, Ian
• Position: Canada

INTRODUCTION

What is the proper role for the judiciary in the governance of a country? This must be the most fundamental question when the work of judges is examined. It is a constitutional question. Naturally, the judicial role or, more specifically, the method of judicial decision-making, critically affects how lawyers function before the courts, i.e., what should be the content of the legal argument? What facts are needed? At an even more basic level, it affects the education that lawyers should experience.

The present focus of attention is Ivan Cleveland Rand, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1943 until 1959 and widely reputed to be one of the greatest judges on that Court. His reputation is generally based on his method of decision-making, a method said to have been missing in the work of other judges of his time.

The Rand legal method, based on his view of the judicial function, placed him in illustrious company. His work exemplified the traditional common law approach as seen in the works of classic writers and judges such as Sir Edward Coke, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Blackstone, and Lord Mansfield. And he was in company with modern jurists whose names command respect, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo, as well as a law professor of Rand at Harvard, Roscoe Pound. In his judicial decisions, addresses and other writings, he kept no secrets about his approach and his view of the judicial role. He paraded both for all to see and he actively advocated them

There is, however, a problem the existence of which creates somewhat of a mystery. The common law method existed for centuries, indeed since time immemorial as the theory went; but in the nineteenth century it came under attack and was largely superseded as the appropriate legal method by the end of that century. In Canada, to a far greater degree than in the United States or even England, the approach of Coke, Hale, Blackstone, and Mansfield became illegitimate half a century before Ivan Rand's appointment to the bench.

Without a significant academic tradition, the Canadian legal profession of the late nineteenth century did not sustain a knowledge of the past. In England, with its strong practice tradition, the common law method survived in the technical lore of the legal profession; in the United States, jurists such as Holmes, Cardozo, and Pound gave the common law method a constant presence at the highest level of the legal system, just when the legal profession generally abandoned it. So, while the traditional common law method hardly survived in Canada, Ivan Cleveland Rand, a Harvard educated lawyer, eagerly read Blackstone. (1)

The methodology that gained acceptance within the legal profession in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which laid claim to being "legal reasoning" to the exclusion of any other approach, is generally known today as "formalism".

CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

In 1990, Justice Beverley McLachlin (as she then was) clearly signalled a shift in direction when, for the Court, she called for judges (and lawyers) to adopt "a more flexible approach" and for decisions to be "rooted in the principle and policy underlying the ... rule." (2) In 1995, Justice Peter Cory, for the Court, declared that the judiciary had the jurisdiction to modify or extend the common law in order to comply with prevailing social conditions and values. (3) Three years later, speaking for a sizeable majority of the Court, he decried the taking of a "formalistic or legalistic approach" rather than a "case-by-case consideration" in decision-making in the legal system. (4) These pronouncements inaugurated a new period in which Canada's highest court repudiated the model of decision-making known as "formalism" and returned the role of the judge to that which existed at common law.

Under formalism, legal expertise consisted in technical knowledge of rules. It was the age of the lawyer as a 'rule mechanic' and any deviation from that model was rejected as unprofessional. Any other approach to decision-making was "political" in nature and not suitable for the legal system. Under the formal model, the appropriate credentials for a judge required a technical knowledge of legal rules and impartiality in their application to a dispute, with impartiality understood as the judge not having a personal bias, either for or against any of the parties involved in the dispute, and a lack of any interest in the outcome of the particular matter being adjudicated.

The change, constitutional in nature, that emanated from the Court continues to be met today with resistance within the profession because of the hold that formalism acquired on the mind-set of Canadian lawyers. The formal model had acquired status as a fundamental belief about law and how to think like a lawyer. It had been unchallenged by critical academic analysis of any significance in Canada. The phrase "principled approach" was used to distinguish this changed model of judicial decision-making from formalism though, beginning in the 1970s, the term "contextualism" also gained a certain currency to identify the "new" method. But, was it a new method? The Canadian legal profession had experienced the "principled approach" before, in the work of Ivan Rand!

WHAT WAS LEGAL FORMALISM?

As a model of judicial decision-making, formalism developed in the nineteenth century, to resolve disputes within the legal system by application of fixed principles or rules to facts. The principles and rules were identifiable as "fixed" because they were found in sources deemed authoritative (the standard query with respect to the source of a rule or principle is: "is it an authority?") and the prime source of such "fixed" principles was a previous decision by a judge; that is, a precedent. The authority of the earlier case, "fixed" by the doctrine of stare decisis, bound judges by principles or rules of law articulated in past decisions, with the result that changes could only be undertaken by the legislature, i.e., political process and not by the judiciary. This doctrine was not adopted to achieve predictability and fairness of treatment for litigants but as a principle of constitutional law reflecting the prevailing view that judges did not have a creative role regarding the law; creativity was the job for politicians. Stare decisis developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and was declared to be settled by the end of that century.

Formalism required a lawyer to distill a "ratio decidendi" from the reasons for decision of a judge in a case. The ratio has been understood over the years to mean a number of things, but its essence was the construction of a rule from a case and the case becoming the authority for that rule. With time, more and more such rules were created and they governed the technocratic practice of law, along with the rules created by legislation.

The finding of "an authority" gave the appearance that a judge simply "found" the law and did not "make it". If the law as "found" needed reform in order to respond to new social conditions, a formalist declared such a change to be the responsibility of the political system through legislative amendment. A judgment written by a formalist displayed a search for the right form of words to express a principle or rule and not a discussion of the problem as it existed in society and a proposed solution to fulfill social needs. Once the rule was found, it then led to a result good or bad for society and just or unjust for a particular litigant. A formalist judge had no other choice to make.

Formalists found support for their approach in what is known as the declaratory theory of law, reflected in the eighteenth century work of William Blackstone. He presented law as a complete body of rules existing from time immemorial and unchangeable, except to the limited extent that legislatures could change the rules by enacting statutes. (5) Later in this essay, I will examine whether lawyers who promoted formalism and the consequent creation of a technocracy were disingenuous and deliberately distorted Blackstone's method, or whether they actually misunderstood the theory. Whatever the reality, the literal use of this theory permitted formalism to project the claim of value neutral decision-making. (6) Judges found existing principles or rules in the ratio decidendi of previous cases and had no choice but to follow these rules or principles. Policy considerations (social values) were not to enter the picture. The development of the formalist model, armed with the declaratory theory, proceeded into the twentieth century.

A crucial aspect of formalism is that the fixed principles are general propositions and are not fact specific. To engage the general rules, only certain facts (viewed as socially crucial) are significant. With certain values accepted as indisputable, deviations are not identified as social behaviour worthy of recognition by the law. (7) Judges are not to undertake a detailed examination of the particular facts of a case but merely to identify certain key facts to produce a quick and certain result as governed by the controlling principles.

Formalism thus provides judges with the appearance of objectivity; the legal process is seen as separate from the political process in which policy is discussed and a socially acceptable solution reached. The knowledge possessed by a lawyer or a judge within the legal system is characterised as "technical knowledge" because rules of law are viewed in the same way that one sees the rules of a technical trade. The growth of formalism as a model had a certain attraction for lawyers because one could speak of a "legal" point of view as opposed to a moral or political point of view; there was also "legal" reasoning, and a "legal" question. The formal model offered the legal profession a distinct identity; and the requirement of "legal" knowledge of a technical nature gave lawyers an...