Our legal system needs many more RBGs and Beverley McLachlins - TIM LOUIS

On Friday, September 18, my attendant, Cory Wilson, gave me the bad news — he’d just received a text from his wife that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. RBG was an icon in the American legal community, and far, far more.

Before being appointed to the US Supreme Court by then-president Bill Clinton, she’d appeared as counsel before that court on six occasions, and was successful on five of them.

From Day One of her path through the legal profession — going back as far as Harvard Law School in 1956, when she was one of only nine women in her class of about 500 — RBG was a was a trailblazer for gender equality. In fact, she introduced the term “gender equality” into our lexicon. As an example of the many challenges she faced along the way, at Harvard the dean asked her and the other eight female students to explain to him how they justified taking the place of a man at his school!

In 1972, prior to appearing before the US Supreme Court, RBG led the founding of the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. Its goal is to urge courts to treat gender discrimination in the same constitutional terms as race discrimination, and reverse any form of gender discrimination that denies equality to women.

Surprisingly, by RBG’s own account, her all-time favourite client was not a woman but a man, one whose wife had tragically died giving birth to their son.

In those days in the US, a widow with a child was eligible to receive a monthly family benefit from the federal government. RBG’s client applied for this same benefit as a widower so he could stay at home and care for his son, and was promptly turned down. He wrote a letter of protest to his local newspaper, something that eventually brought his cause to the attention of RBG. She took up his case, which wound its way up the judicial ladder, eventually to the US Supreme Court.

RBG changed American society by winning a landmark decision for that widower, 8-0 (one of the nine judges was absent due to illness). Many years later, she officiated at her former client’s marriage ceremony to his second wife. And years after that, she officiated once more, this time at the marriage of the now-adult son.

On Monday, I listened with great interest as the former chief justice of Canada’s Supreme Court — the first female Canadian chief justice — Beverley McLachlin was interviewed on CBC Radio about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As many of you know, Beverley McLachlin was also my first-year contracts professor at UBC law school.

Ms. McLachlin was by far the best law professor I had. She was always a very clear thinker, able to summarize complex ideas and arguments succinctly. She was also very positive and had a unique ability to breathe colour into drab and boring ancient cases from the British court system.

A few years later, shortly after I started my law practice, I had the pleasure of appearing before Her Honour McLachlin at BC Supreme Court. No other judge I appeared before had ever ordered both myself and the opposing counsel to head down the hall and settle the case over a cup of coffee in the barristers’ lounge.

In my legal experience over the past 37 years, I’ve always found female judges to be much more practical than their male counterparts. Looking back, I regret the fact that law schools did not make a greater effort decades ago to ensure that an equal number of male and female students were admitted.

I also believe it’s society loss that we do not have an equal number of female and male lawyers today. The same applies for the judiciary, although this is slowly being corrected as more and more women are being appointed as judges.

The legal system has been so enriched by strong-minded women like RBG and Beverley McLachlin. You can’t help but wonder how much richer it would be today had gender equality been a reality in the law profession long, long ago.

Daily atmospheric CO₂ [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]

Latest daily total (Sept. 23, 2020): 411.27 ppm

One year ago (Sept. 23, 2019): 408.83 ppm