The wrong kind of justice warriors

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 it, not just 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 institutions 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.