Cause lawyering

Cause lawyering, as I learned when I was asked to speak at a University of Toronto Faculty of Law conference on this topic, is lawyering for the greater good. You could think of it as social justice lawyering.

I was honoured to be invited to be the key note speaker at this event last week.

Here is some of what I said.

Law vs justice

I started law school with a criminal record, and I finished it with a longer one. In fact, I spent the first day of my second year of law school in jail because I had been denied bail for my most recent arrest.

It’s important for all of us law “insiders” to consider that law and justice may not be the same thing.  In fact,  I think that in many situations, they are definitely not, and that’s one of the reasons why we need cause lawyering. It’s also why I decided — in my mid-30s – to go to law school. I had tried other approaches to doing social justice work — working in the not-for-profit sector, being a municipal politician, trying to get elected to the provincial government, engaging in non-violent direct action campaigns – but none of them seemed to lead to positive system change.

I wanted to see whether there was a place for me to work inside the law that, for the previous several years, I had been challenging from the outside.

In many ways, I was not a typical law student – at least not in the late 1980s. I’d been out of school for 15 years; I had kids to get off to school each morning and get home to each afternoon; meals to prepare and homework to supervise as well as my own homework to do. I had a part-time job, and I was still a trustee on the school board.

Hitting the books

Despite these challenges, I loved law school from the minute I sat down in my first class. I knew I had made the right decision.

It turned out that law school loved me, too. I was a much better student than I had ever expected to be. However, as graduation got closer, I started to worry about what would come next. I lived and went to law school in a medium-sized city, where most lawyers were sole practitioners. How would I find an articling position? How would I manage the bar admissions course – at that time, we had to attend in person —  which was only offered in three locations, none of them where my children and I lived? Would I be denied entry to the bar because of my criminal record? What kind of job would I find?

In the end, everything worked out. I did my articles working with two sole practitioners, where I really learned how to be a lawyer. Turned out, much to my disappointment, the Law Society wasn’t the least bit interested in my criminal record. And, my kids got used to spending time with other people while I came and went to complete the bar admissions course.

As for a job – I decided to open my own practice, because I figured that would be the only way I could do what I really wanted to: use the law as a tool to work for social justice.

Working for justice

I’ll be honest with you. Often, I don’t feel like I am a real lawyer. I’m no longer fluent in the secret language of lawyers; I’m not up to speed on court process, and I don’t always have time to pore over recent case law. When I was a law student, I knew the names of every Supreme Court justice and could quote bits and pieces from various of their decisions, but those days are gone. As I realized a couple of months ago when I watched a Supreme Court hearing, I didn’t know the names of a single justice.

The thing is, none of this bothers me, because I feel like I have taken what I learned in law school and from my time practising law and turned it into that tool for social justice that I was looking for when I went to law school.

In my work, cause lawyering has meant that I have engaged in a wide range of activities — that, I hope, have contributed to the greater good. For example, I’ve worked with others to:

• Demystify legal systems to survivors who engage with them
• Educate those within legal systems, including lawyers and judges, about gender-based and intimate-partner violence
• Train those who support survivors of GBV about the law
• Build campaigns to increase public awareness
• Change laws and policies to improve system responses to GBV

My work, which has also included participating in inquiries, inquests and Ontario’s domestic violence death review committee, has been rooted in community and coalition, as we have worked to not just improve laws, but also to challenge the power of law and the notion that the law is the ultimate response to GBV. Through all of that work, I try to remember the privilege of being a member of this profession and the power and responsibility that come with it.

 As I write in the conclusion to my book:

“At the end of it all, I absolutely love this work that I have had the honour and privilege to be able to do. . . . I have been one small part of a global movement to end violence against women. What could be a better way to have spent 30+ years of my life?”