Prof. Lorraine Weinrib

This extensive oral history interview with Professor Lorraine Weinrib provides a comprehensive account of her groundbreaking career as a constitutional lawyer and academic, spanning from her early days as one of the first women litigators at the Ministry of the Attorney General through her influential work on Charter development and international constitutional consulting.

Weinrib describes her education in classics at York University and law school at the University of Toronto (1970-1973), where she faced significant gender discrimination. She articled at the Ministry of the Attorney General in 1973-74, becoming the first woman hired to do litigation. Under the mentorship of David Mundell, she developed expertise in constitutional law and federalism, working on major Supreme Court cases including the Anti-Inflation Reference, Senate Reference, and Patriation Reference. Her detailed account of Charter development from 1977-1982 reveals Roy McMurtry’s pivotal but underrecognized role in Ontario’s support for the Charter, which proved essential to its adoption.

After pursuing graduate studies at Yale Law School (1983-84), Weinrib returned to head constitutional law policy during the Charter’s early implementation. She describes significant tensions within the ministry between criminal and civil lawyers over Charter litigation approaches. Her comparative constitutional expertise led to consulting work in Israel and South Africa on their democratic transitions. The interview concludes with her 1988 transition to the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where she developed innovative approaches to constitutional theory and comparative constitutionalism, and her reflections on the gender challenges faced by pioneer women lawyers in the 1970s and 1980s.

This description was written by AI and may contain some inaccuracies.