More and More Lawyers; Less and Less Justice 137

• Author: Roy McMurtry
• Pages: 137-148

[137]

More and More Lawyers; Less and Less Justice

roy mCmu rtry

   the legal profession is as pressing or seemi ngly intractable as

access to justice: “[T]here are indiv iduals in society who need a law yer to

exercise and/or protect their legal rights but ca nnot af‌ford one.”1 The issue

of access to justice raises the question of the proper role of lawyers in en-

suring the adm inistration of justice in society.

During my own legal c areer, the number of lawyers in Ontar io has

increased from approximately 5,00 0 in 1958 to 40,889 in 2009. These

numbers refer to lawyers who are entitled to practice, including l awyers

in education and government. There are cert ainly more and more lawyers.

And yet, in the opinion of many, there is less and less justice.

My more than f‌ifty yea rs as a member of the legal profession can be

roughly broken down into three areas of professional responsibility.

Called to the Bar in 1958, I w as a litigator in both criminal and c ivil cases

for seventeen years before being elected to the Ontario legisl ature, where

I served for ten years as the provinci al attorney general in the government

of Premier William G . Davis. After ser ving as the high comm issioner to

the United Kingdom for almost four years, I returned to practice law for

two-and-a-half years before being appointed as a ch ief justice of Ontario,

1 Alice Woolley, “Access to Justice” in A lice Woolley, Richard Devlin , Brent Cotter, &

John M. Law, eds., Law yers’ Ethics and Pro fessional Regulation (Toronto: LexisNex is

Canada , 2008) at 490.