My Life in Crime and Other Academic Adventures (review)

Some professors accomplish much in a short career. Some have a long career, but accomplish little. Fortunately for Canadian law and letters, Martin Friedland has enjoyed a remarkable half-century scholarly career during which he has continuously accomplished much. Even more fortunately, he has recorded and interpreted this career with his habitual insight, grace, and felicitous prose. This is no string of anecdotes, although there are anecdotes aplenty. Friedland weaves the personal, the professional, the scholarly, the descriptive, and the analytical into a seamless narrative of one extraordinary life in the law.

I read this memoir with the passion of a forensic scientist, for my own career has often been punctuated by transformative encounters (both in person and mediated by text and context) with Marty. How, I thought, would he understand and articulate the broader circumstances of those encounters?

The first time I ‘met’ Martin Friedland, the professor, was in late August 1969, when I acquired Cases and Materials on Criminal Law and Procedure, the assigned text for my first-year criminal law course at Osgoode Hall. Even before my initial class, I had thumbed the volume. The use of materials, including a police photograph, from a single case (R. v. Truscott) to illustrate the dynamics of the criminal trial process was only the first of Marty’s many innovative contributions over the years to law teaching.

Five years later, Marty was ensconced as dean of Law at the University of Toronto, in which capacity he hosted a lunch for me and the other members of the LL.M. class of 1974. In turn we replied to his query as to how we had passed the summer. When I said that I had worked at a summer camp north of Toronto, he left me with a quip about the peculiarities of institutional life (not least in universities) that I have often used since: ‘The whole world is just a big summer camp.’ This book bears testimony to the fact that, in the Toronto of our youth, summer camp is where we met many of the most important people in our lives (including our spouses) and where we learned about the world.

A decade later I saw Marty in action again as a member of a committee he chaired that was meant to develop a project in law for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. While I became formally involved with the project only some years later, that early setting gave me insight into why Marty has been asked so often to take on high-profile and highly sensitive committees of inquiry. Marty is a great listener, is highly organized, breaks projects into manageable stages, does not lose the thread, writes magnificently, and delivers what he undertakes to accomplish on time – all qualities reflected in the various chapters of this chronicle.

The enrolment of his son Tom at the McGill Law Faculty during my deanship, and a visit to Montreal to promote his book, The Case of Valentine Shortis, gave me the opportunity to invite Marty to one of our faculty retreats. As professors and colleagues we benefited greatly from his insight into contemporary challenges of pedagogy and scholarship at the dawn of the electronic era. Few academics can match his knowledge, wisdom, and commitment to the noble enterprise that is legal education in Canada. Indeed, the further one gets in this memoir the greater is one’s admiration for the working methods of a scholar who, while truly committed to conventional law, has made an enormous contribution to interdisciplinarity in legal inquiry.

As the above recital intimates, it has been an enormous privilege for me to have profited from Marty’s counsel in so many and such diverse settings. And in reading Marty’s own account of his career I realize that it is studded with dozens of like moments in every dimension, involving hundreds of students and colleagues whom he touched as deeply. In every chapter the reader catches a different glimpse of...