In Search of 'Bora's Head'

I Introduction

There is a bust of Bora Laskin situated just outside the entrance to the Bora Laskin Law Library in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Students at U of T have affectionately appropriated this spot, which they call 'Bora's Head,' and it is a popular gathering place at the law school. I often wonder what the students today think when they come together at Bora's Head to study for exams or sell tickets for the Law Follies. What does Bora Laskin mean to them? What should he mean to them? In answering this question, I first had to consider what he means to me.

I never met Bora Laskin, and yet he has loomed large in my professional life. For this reason, I read Philip Girard's accessible and engaging biography Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life, published in 2005, with more than mere professional interest. That same year, a major conference was hosted by the Law Society of Upper Canada to commemorate Laskin, entitled The Laskin Legacy: A Commemoration of the Life and Contributions of the Right Honourable Bora Laskin, P.C., C.C.¹ A series of essays arising from this conference was published in 2007 under the title The Laskin Legacy: Essays in Commemoration of Chief Justice Bora Laskin. These two examinations of Laskin's legacy are distinct in a number of ways. Girard has penned a thoroughly researched and sparklingly written biography. The Commemoration, by contrast, brought together those who knew and were touched by Laskin, including former students, law clerks, judicial and academic colleagues, friends, and members of the profession who argued before him. Together, these appraisals of Laskin provide vivid and thought-provoking reflections of the man and his times. This essay is an attempt to assess Laskin's continuing reach and his impact on Canada's legal community.

II Laskin's aura

Legacies are defined not by the accomplishments of the past but, rather, by the influence those accomplishments have on the present. In this sense, Laskin's aura continues to pervade Canada's legal community, just as Pierre Elliott Trudeau's aura continues to pervade Canada's political community. Indeed, Laskin and Trudeau each in his own way served as midwife to the 'Just Society,' which, on our best days, continues to characterize Canada's aspiration. As Ian Binnie said of Laskin and Trudeau, 'In both cases, the country wanted some relief from the apathy and lack of imagination that permeated our national life.'²

In Laskin's case, this aura is a product not only of his skill and talent as a jurist but also of what he represented, and what is meant now when his name and achievements are invoked. Just as Trudeau conjures the image of a confident, cosmopolitan, risk-taking political age for Canada, Laskin is invoked as the standard-bearer for an intellectually rigorous, modern, progressive legal age for Canada. As Girard writes in his introduction to Bringing Law to Life,

When I entered law school in 1975 Bora Laskin was at the height of his powers and his fame. Chief Justice of Canada for less than two years, he was the first Jew and the first academic named to the Supreme Court of Canada. Belonging to neither of Canada's European founding nations, and known for his rigorous commitment to the highest ethical and intellectual standards on the part of the judiciary, he symbolized a new spirit of openness and transformation in Canadian society and law.

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The Commemoration includes similarly lofty tributes, focusing on Laskin's passion for the justice and morality of law, for the love of learning, and for progressive social change. Below, I explore three dimensions of Laskin's aura - his Jewish identity, his academic identity, and his identity as a public lawyer and jurist.

III Identity and Laskin

The first way in which Laskin looms large is as the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. This is also how I first encountered him. As I grew up in the Toronto Jewish community in the 1960s and 1970s, Bora Laskin...