The Last Word: Media Coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada (Florian Sauvageau David Schneiderman David Taras)

• Author: Mike James
• Position: Is a third year law student at the University of Victoria , Faculty of Law
• Pages: 109-112

APPEAL VOLUME 13 n 109

BOOK REVIEW

THE LAST WORD: MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE

SUPREME COURT OF CANADA

BY FLORIAN SAUVAGEAU, DAVID SCHNEIDERMAN, AND DAVID TARAS

Reviewed By Michael James*

CITED: (2008) 13 Appeal 109-112

The public often perceives the law as inscrutable. In The Trial, Franz Kafka tells the par-

able of a man from the country who comes before the law, desiring admittance. The imposing

doorkeeper tells him that he cannot be admitted now, but adds that it may be possible later.

The man from the country is surprised, thinking the law should be accessible to all. Neverthe-

less, he takes up a stool and sits and waits for years. When his life is nearly spent, he beckons

the doorkeeper, asking why no others have come. As he dies, the man hears the doorkeeper’s

reply: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended

for you. I am now going to shut it.”1 Though the parable admits of many interpretations, a key

point that Kafka raises is that there is a wall separating the public from the law.

Today, journalists are the doorkeepers to the law. The Last Word: Media Coverage of the

Supreme Court of Canada,2 written by Florian Sauvageau, David Schneiderman, and David

Taras, considers the relationship between the Canadian news media and the Supreme Court of

Canada. Unlike Kafka’s doorkeeper, journalists have the job of transmitting and interpreting the

law’s judgments to the world outside the legal profession. The Last Word ably scrutinises that

considerable power and how it is wielded.

The authors come from different universities and backgrounds: Sauvageau is a Professor

of Communications at Laval; Schneiderman is an Associate Professor of Law at Toronto; Taras

is a Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at Calgary. Rather than a strictly

legal work, the book is written from a legally-informed social sciences perspective. Eschewing

the deferential tone favoured by some legal commentators, the authors deal critically with both

the media and the court.3

The authors of The Last Word set themselves two principal tasks: to describe Supreme

Court reporting and to examine the relationship between the court and journalists. To these

ends, they survey and analyse coverage of Supreme Court judgments. The book opens with a

vignette personifying the pressures of reporting on the court as a television journalist. Following

* Michael James is a third year law student at the University of Victoria , Faculty of Law.

1 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. by Willa & Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) at 213-215.

2 Florian Sauvageau, David Schneiderman & David Taras, The Last Word: Media Coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada

(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006) [“The Last Word”].

3 For example: the authors refer to ‘the court’ without capitalisation, in contrast to its rendering in legal works (i.e. ‘the

Court’).