• Duff: A Life in the Law

    by David Williams. Published with the University of British Columbia Press, 1984. Out of Print. Sir Lyman Duff is often described as Canada’s most distinguished jurist. His career encompassed forty years in high judicial office, the last eleven as Chief Justice of Canada. More than any other individual, he shaped the Supreme Court and its decisions… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Chief Justice W.R. Jackett: By the Law of the Land

    by Richard W. Pound. Published with McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. When Richard Pound told us he was working on a biography of Wilbur Jackett, former Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Canada, and asked us to consider publication, we were pleased and somewhat sceptical. We had recently published Ian Bushnell’s history of the Federal Court… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Canadian Maverick: The Life of Ivan C. Rand

    by William Kaplan. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2009. Ivan Rand had a long, varied and remarkable career. He is best known for his Supreme Court of Canada judgments in a series of cases emanating from Quebec in the 1950s and dealing with civil rights, cases which established limits on the government’s ability to… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Brian Dickson: A Judge’s Journey

    by Robert Sharpe, Justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and Professor Kent Roach, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2003. After coming of age during the Depression on the Prairies, being severely wounded in World War II, and after a career as a successful and prosperous… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life

    by Philip Girard, Professor of Law, History & Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University, 2005. Published with the University of Toronto Press. In any account of Canadian law in the 20th century, Bora Laskin looms large. This biography explores in vivid detail the life and times of a restless man on a mission. In his first career,… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Judging Bertha Wilson: Law As Large As Life

    by Ellen Anderson, Lawyer, Barrie, Ontario. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2001. Bertha Wilson is the first woman to be appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal. She is the first woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada at that critical moment when the Charter was entrenched. Nevertheless, Bertha Wilson has… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • The Life And Times Of Arthur Maloney: The Last Of The Tribunes

    by Charles Pullen. Published with Dundurn Press Ltd, 1994. Out of Print. Arthur Maloney was a charmingly complicated and skilled man who came out of the Ottawa Valley determined to make something of himself as other members of his family had done before him. By the time he died in 1984 he had been a successful… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Aggressive in Pursuit: The Life of Justice Emmett Hall

    by Frederick Vaughan, formerly of the Political Science Department, University of Guelph. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2004. In 1963 Prime Minister John Diefenbaker elevated Chief Justice Hall of Saskatchewan to the Supreme Court of Canada. This judicial biography focuses on Hall’s career as defence lawyer, and civil litigator, his position as a civil… Read more »

    Continue reading