The wrong kind of justice warriors
Schools should teach law, not impose values
No law school in the country may be more frank about producing social justice warriors than the University of Victoria, where Dean Jeremy Webber says in his welcoming message the following: “… this faculty has prided itself on its commitment to social justice.
“That’s an elusive aim, one that everyone claims to pursue. At UVic, it means all members of faculty accept that legal education ought to speak to all members of society, including those who are marginalized.
“Our focus on Indigenous legal traditions, for example, has been second to none.
“Different faculty members define their particular focus differently, but all share the general objective.…
Aside from the unsettling suggestion that all the law professors at UVic think the same ( surely an odd bragging point) or at least agree on the larger goals — this after all is not so different from the Law Society of Ontario’s insistence that its members acknowledge their obligation to promote progressive values — Webber has it pretty much right too.
With a few exceptions, Canada’s law schools are increasingly determined not to be left behind by other faculties, such as education studies and social work, where SJWs, as they’re often called, make no bones about being all about anti-racism, gender equity and wholesale reform to the institutions of the country.
That’s what social justice means, as Queen’s University law prof Bruce Pardy noted a couple of weeks ago in the National Post.
He was writing about the verdict in the Colten Boushie case and the University of Windsor’s law school statement about it, in which the school pronounced the legal system as oppressive and said “a reinvention of our legal system is necessary.”
Now for as long as there have been lawyers, there have been lawyers fighting for the progressive values of their day, and against injustice, in a range of ways — representing poor clients pro bono ( short for pro bono publico, which is Latin meaning a service provided free and for the public good), taking on unpopular causes or clients, even focusing their practices in areas they believe are under- served, and working for peanuts in legal aid clinics or on legal aid certificates.
(I know many who fit that bill, but the one I always think of when I hear the pro bono phrase is Peter Rosenthal of Toronto, a University of Toronto math professor and a lawyer who for decades has doggedly represented those who cannot afford even the cheapest lawyer.)
That’s all good, of course, even noble. And the same holds true for law professors and law students. As Pardy said in an email Tuesday, it’s perfectly legitimate for prof and student to “pick apart judgments as they see fit and articulate the values that they believe the law should reflect.” It’s qualitatively different, though, when law schools get into the muck of things, espouse and impose a particular set of values or opinions and a way of thinking. In the theatre that is a law faculty, the dean and the administration are the equivalent of the judge in a courtroom, and when judges do this, they’re invariably criticized for “descending into the arena”, meaning getting down and dirty. As Pardy said, “It is not legitimate for a law school to do so, because then the institution becomes a political actor imposing an ideology on their professors and students.”
And lots of the law schools are doing i t, not j ust at Windsor and Victoria.
On Feb. 13, Adam Dodek, the dean of the common law faculty at the University of Ottawa, sent a message about the Boushie verdict to his students, extending “our deepest sympathies” to the Boushie family and Indigenous people, which is fair enough. Then he said, in part, “We recognize that the legal institutions of this country have not only failed to deliver justice to Indigenous peoples of this country but have in fact continued to perpetrate many injustices. We acknowledge that racism still very much exists in our justice system.
“As jurists, professors, and law students, it is incumbent upon us to speak out against injustice, especially within our justice system.”
As one U of O law student said, the email made clear that “There are acceptable and unacceptable views at Canada’s universities.”
A self-described conservative student, he said while he rolled his eyes at professors expressing their views in class, the dean’s email “really got to me.” He’d read a lot about the Boushie trial, he said, and formed his own views, “which were that this was a complicated case” that raised all kinds of questions, including about race.
“But as the dean’s message made clear, these kinds of ideas are not acceptable. All 12 of the jurors were bigots.” The message wasn’t as strong as Windsor’s, he said, “but its purpose is pretty much the same.
“As students of the faculty, we had our marching orders. The decision was racist and so is our legal system.”
Pardy said when universities take on social justice mandates, they “become combatants in the culture wars” and this is “especially insidious when it comes to the law schools, since they are training tomorrow’s lawyers and judges.
“They will graduate from i nstitutions funded with public money to promote the views that legal justice and progressive values are synonymous and that Western legal principles are oppressive.”
FYI: In response to many readers, a GoFundMe page has been set up for Randy Fleming, the Caledonia, Ont., man I wrote about Tuesday.