Daunting Enterprise of the Law: Essays in Honour of Harry W. Arthurs ed. by Simon Archer, Daniel Drache and Peer Zumbansen (review)

Editing a collection of essays in honour of Harry Arthurs is itself a daunting task. During his long career, Arthurs has been active as a public intellectual, especially as an influential and off-cited labour arbitrator, university president, and author of official reports evaluating the state of legal education or labour law. He also has enjoyed an impressive scholarly career, contributing to the fields of labour law, administrative law, and legal education, as well as developing a pluralist approach to the law. He writes with verve, and increasingly for a transnational audience. His editors, a labour lawyer, a political economist, and a transnational legal theorist, have done an admirable job in identifying themes and assembling a wide range of authors – twenty-five – to reflect upon Arthurs' contribution to legal scholarship and their own work. Some chapters explain Arthur's major intellectual contributions, for example his ideas on legal pluralism (Brian Langille in Chapter 1, Eric Tucker in Chapter 4), industrial citizenship (Gregor Murray in Chapter 3) and the law of subordination and resistance (Katherine V.W. Stone in Chapter 21), and detail his law reform efforts and impact on the trajectory of labour law (Gilles Trudeau in Chapter 5; Kevin Banks in Chapter 14 and Guy Davidov in Chapter 15). Others use his approach as a way of contesting existing boundaries of labour law (Kerry Rittich's discussion of informal work in Chapter 6), or for looking for other sources of norm generation and resistance for building transnational labour law (Adelle Blackett in Chapter 18).

The collection emphasizes Arthurs' intellectual contribution as a legal academic. There is some reference to his personal and social history in the introduction and the chapters by Langille and, especially, Mark Freedland, which helps to explain Arthurs' focus on labour law and industrial relations. He was part of Jewish intellectual life in Toronto, which had a decidedly leftish, educated, and labour tradition. At that time, Jews were shut out of much of Toronto's political elite. His grandfather was a labour supporter, and his legal mentors combined a range of professional roles, such as professor, arbitrator, lawyer, and judge. Arthurs studied labour law with the prominent labour law scholar Bora Laskin in 1957, and went to Harvard to study with Archibald Cox, also a prominent labour law and civil rights scholar, where he wrote a thesis on the legal regulation of picketing. Given his intellectual training and milieu, it is not surprising that Arthurs adopted a critical realist perspective on the common law approach judges took to resolving industrial conflict in Canada. He endorsed autonomous collective bargaining and supportive state regulation that would institutionalize industrial democracy and citizenship. He believed that the social generation of legal norms was more likely to be successful in resolving conflict than state imposed solutions. Arthurs adopted a legal pluralist account of the development and institutionalization of norms, which led him to reject the idea that superior courts were the sole and true measure of legality. His approach to judicial review and its role in administrative law in general and labour law in particular reflected his attention to social context and the microphysics of power. He drew on and developed this account of the workings of law in his role as an arbitrator, where he helped to construct the boundaries of industrial citizenship. He argued that lawyers should be trained in a variety of social sciences, and that law was an academic study and a vocation. Robert Gordon observes that Arthurs' heroic view of legal education comes from his own career, where he played a number of important and different institutional roles, and has in his own practice and scholarship "striven to bring deeper historical knowledge and broader comparative social knowledge to bear upon the solution of current problems." (197)

The book is divided into seven parts comprised of twenty-four...