Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J.L. Cohen (review)

Jacob Laurence Cohen - Jack to his family, J.L. to his clients - became a labour lawyer in the 1920s, back when that was a risky line of work. For one thing, no such institution as Legal Aid existed to help pay the bills of those representing indigent clients. Indeed, labour law as we know it did not yet exist. It was Cohen, the key architect of the right to collective bargaining in Canada, who, in the face of vociferous and sometimes violent opposition, drafted the legal framework within which present-day industrial relations in this nation operate.

In Cohen's case, the risks were both personal and professional. A social historian at the University of Toronto, Laurel Sefton MacDowell paints Cohen as an emotionally fragile man, despite his arrogant, imperious manner. A substance-abusing workaholic given to unpredictable and self-destructive behaviour, he burned out, physically and mentally, at the age of fifty-three in 1950. MacDowell, almost parenthetically, surmises that he committed suicide.

His death elicited the kind of encomiums and expressions of regret that are due a man of his stature and years of productive commitment. But many of his contemporaries were less sympathetic, because his last few years were overshadowed by a sex scandal that saw him convicted of and serving time for criminally assaulting a young French-Canadian woman, his stenographer. The incident and its humiliating aftermath not only pushed him over the edge but also tainted his legacy as one of the important progressive legal advocates in Canadian history.

Cohen involved himself in the most controversial issues of the day not for the sake of gaining notoriety - a loner, he despised the limelight - but because his conscience demanded it. Did this deeply flawed man take on work that was socially redeeming in the hope that this would somehow save him? Were his public virtues enough to permit that his personal moral failures be overlooked?

The author addresses the latter question - or avoids it - by describing the arc of Cohen's life as classic tragedy, as a collision of choice and circumstance. His father died when Jack was only thirteen; as MacDowell tells the story (citing a smattering of masculinity studies), the burden of becoming the family's principal breadwinner would set him down a path that would not only make him as a professional but break him as a man.

J.L. Cohen was all of twenty-one when called to the bar in 1918. He began specializing in labour law in part because he grew up in a working-class immigrant neighbourhood in Toronto, and partly because endemic anti-Semitism set limits on the kinds of clients Jewish lawyers were able to attract. Yet it was only after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1925 that he threw himself into causes of 'social significance' with a special zeal: he investigated the disappearance, and presumed murder, of two Finnish labour leaders in Port Arthur; defended the civil liberties of Communist party members such as Tim Buck and Norman Freed; and negotiated on behalf of striking miners and garment workers from Kirkland Lake to Oshawa.

Nevertheless, 'Cohen's work and the historical origins of the Canadian industrial-relations system have been forgotten, neglected, or misunderstood,' MacDowell writes in her epilogue, 'and this study has sought to rectify that loss of historical memory.'

Order-in-Council PC1003 (1944), as the pioneering piece of legislation was known, is viewed by some historians as a setback rather than a victory; 'post-war settlement' theorists argue it was a compromise that served merely to freeze out labour's demands and to keep it in bureaucratic check. MacDowell disagrees, and feels that Cohen would too, concluding that 'the post-war settlement argument lacks historical evidence to make it supportable in its current form, and it also lacks an understanding of the labour-relations system as it developed in Cohen's time or as it functions now.'

Historiographical debates aside, MacDowell's work does much to...