A Judge's Journey.

• Author: Kostal, R.W.
• Position: Book review

Shilling for Judges: Brian Dickson and His Biographers

Robert J. Sharpe and Kent Roach, Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2003. Pp. xiv, 576.

An unmistakable sign of a power shift is the sudden proliferation of justificatory propaganda. Not thirty years ago, Canadian judges were deservedly viewed as marginal figures in the country's political structure. (In this regard, professors of law were not even worth talking about.) Of course the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1) or, put more precisely, the first phase of Charter interpretation by the Supreme Court of Canada, changed all that. Suddenly this handful of unelected lawyers was a formidable political force. Just as suddenly, the Canadian constitutional law professoriate, once almost comprehensively irrelevant, thrilled to their new role as public policy experts. But in all this an irony: although judicial law-making under the Charter has only rarely faced acerbic criticism in Canada, a number of legal scholars have felt no less compelled to vindicate it, even if in curiously oblique ways. In recent years, the judicial biography has proved a popular vehicle for this task.

When Canadian judges had little power, their lives remained mostly unwritten. (Of the fourteen Chief Justices preceding Dickson only one, Lyman Duff, has been seen to merit a full-scale published study. (2)) The book under review, (3) Robert Sharpe and Kent Roach's expansive biography of Brian Dickson, is symptomatic of a much different historical moment. A Judge's Journey follows closely on the heels of W.H. McConnell's narrative study of the life and career of William McIntyre, (4) and Ellen Anderson's more ambitious treatment of the life and judicial legacy of Bertha Wilson. (5) The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History series of the University of Toronto Press has recently published a full-length biography of Bora Laskin, its third such volume in four years. (6) It is not incidental that all the extant works are admiring, sometimes fawning, of their subject matter. They portray the judge--if not as hero--then as exceptionally virtuous champion of the summum bonum of contemporary Canadian jurisprudence: "rights". When these biographers are critical of their subjects, it is in a perfunctory and detectably regretful way. In Canadian legal circles, moreover, this reverential stance is regarded as befitting and even meritorious. For its part, A Judge's Journey has garnered high critical praise, (7) and a prestigious prize. (8) It was co-written by persons of considerable academic weight. Robert Sharpe is the widely published former dean of the law school at University of Toronto (and now a Justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal). Kent Roach is one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars. Both are fellows of the Royal Society. By all accounts and appearances, then, Sharpe and Roach on Dickson is intended (a subtle disclaimer (9) notwithstanding), not as a boardroom decoration, but as a serious work of historical scholarship. And on this basis it is herein reviewed.

In historical scholarship worthy of the name, scholars advance and sustain arguments about their subject matter, and its connectedness to other important events. On this score we encounter the first of A Judge's Journey's many material shortcomings. In the place of explicit theses, Sharpe and Roach are satisfied to advance a number of general claims, claims not so much argued as repeated. In the opinion of this reviewer, however, only one of the book's central claims is uncontroversial: that Brian Dickson was a fine man, exceptionally intelligent, conscientious, and principled. The corollary of this claim, that Dickson was also a great judge, "arguably the most important judge in Canada's history," (10) deserves closer critical scrutiny.

One reason for caution is that the criteria employed by Sharpe and Roach to measure greatness in a judge are theoretically unintelligible. In this regard, only the authors' biases are clear cut. A Judge's Journey relies, to say the most about it, on a simplistic model of Supreme Court judging. Before Dickson was appointed to the Court, the authors contend, the "Court spent its time dealing with technical legal questions and resolving run-of-the-mill legal disputes." (11) In fact, during this long and dismal era the Justices were so timorous and befuddled "they thought their job was to apply precedents to the clear letter of the law, leaving questions of law reform and social justice to the elected legislatures"! (12) In the early phases of Dickson's judicial career--here the authors are brutally frank--he himself embraced this primitivism. But faithful readers are quickly reassured. Although Dickson's career on the bench had an unsure start, during his tenure at the Supreme Court, first as a puisne Justice and then for six pivotal years as its Chief Justice, he found his stride. In fact, in the authors' estimation Dickson ultimately became exactly the right sort of appellate judge, one whose decisions were (the terms are repeated beyond the point of tedium) "creative" and "contextual". Dickson, so it would seem, possessed a very special gift. In sizing up a case, he could discern when the law was out-of-step with the times, and how best to bring it into line with "changing social attitudes and sensibilities." (13) Dickson also had an especially keen sense of what human interests deserved to be fully realized as legal rights, and when these rights were being trod upon by Canada's antediluvian elected bodies. In this new and heroic era of appellate judging, the Supreme Court "would not hesitate to strike down laws the judges thought infringed fundamental rights and freedoms." (14) Once a cautious and even humble institution, under Brian Dickson's stout leadership the Court came to be "at the centre of political life in Canada." (15)

In the hands of Sharpe and Roach, Dickson's (purportedly) uninspired early career as a judge is employed as a literary device. A Judge's Journey is biography as romance quest. It chronicles how a gifted but somewhat hesitant man overcame a series of daunting obstacles (his native conservatism being one) finally to achieve his destiny as a paragon of progressive judicial method during the crucial first years of the Charter era. If Pierre Trudeau was bore to entrench the Charter, Brian Dickson was born to entrench a robust Charter jurisprudence. And if A Judge's Journey has a unifying thread, it is a total and serene...