Download Law Convocation Address - Spring 2008

CONVOCATION ADDRESS (presented by Nicholas Kasirer, at the
Law Convocation, McGill University, 26 May 2008)
Bravo – there’s a superbly transsystemic word that works in the civil law
and the common law, that sends the right message in English or in French –
bravo à la promotion 2008! Bravo à vous, mes chers diplômés, et bravo à
vos familles et vos amis qui vous accompagnent dans la vie et qui participent
pleinement à votre succès ce matin. Bravo from your professors at the
Faculty of Law who are as proud as punch of your achievements and for
every one of those new legal letters – BCL, LLB, LLM, DCL – that you can,
with the blessing of the Chancellor, proudly string after your name as you
leave this great and happy ceremony.
Every class is extraordinary, but my colleagues and I cannot help but
observe a special public-spiritedness that characterizes this particular
convocation. Alors permettez-moi d’ajouter, au bravo lancé ce matin, un
grand merci de la part de tous vos professeurs et de tout le personnel
administratif de l’Université McGill pour vos riches contributions à l’esprit
de corps qui anime la Faculté de droit.
There is a palpable generosity in this great class that has been made plain in
the powerful community you have helped build at 3644 Peel over the last
three or four years. Many of your professors have remarked to me that this
group has evinced an unusual degree of solidarity, a spirit so plain in the
reception we enjoyed together yesterday afternoon in the Faculty with your
parents, families and friends. And it is as much outside the classroom as
inside that this finds expression, in your shared sense that law students must
take up a place in the public square as part of their identity as jurists. This is
the source of profound pride for me as a university professor and profound
optimism for me as a citizen. You have given full meaning to that lawyerly
expression “pro bono” and insodoing, reminded all of us that the full
expression – “pro bono publico” – emphasizes not just generous behaviour,
but giving of one’s time and energy “in the public good”.
Mr Chancellor, let me give you a taste of how members of the class of 2008
have championed the public good in their moments of leisure. These are the
students that have lit up the McGill Legal Information Clinic; set young
scholarly journals on health law and sustainable development law on firm
financial and intellectual footing; published 12 numbers of the venerable
McGill Law Journal, the oldest student-founded law review in this country;
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laboured long hours on Innocence McGill; went to press as Quid Novi and
on the McGill airwaves with Legal Ease; they turned to the theatre with
Actus Reus; they have ensured that the Human Rights Working Group and
the Black Law Students Association remain going concerns. The class of
2008 reached out to high school students and to aboriginal communities in a
bold student initiative to improve accessibility to a legal education and
access to justice. They established a vibrant Graduates Law Student
Association; they enlivened the life of the Faculty with dozens of clubs and
associations from Disability and the Law to the Association of Arab Law
Students, from OUTLAW McGill to Pro Bono McGill, from the Latin
American Law Students Association to the Canadian Constitutional Club.
They have Women Caucus-ed, Skit-Nite-ed and Coffee House-d beyond the
call of duty. All of this energy makes the course aux stages seem to be a
sleepy affair, but my spies tell me that this class excelled there as elsewhere.
If public-spiritedness is a hallmark of the class of 2008, it would seem to
stand in contrast with the image of strategic behaviour and careerism that
one sometimes hears associated with the law and its students. It would seem
that you were inclined, during your stay at McGill, to invest as much
intelligence and energy in the public good – often not for credit or for profit,
unheralded and without any obvious reward – as you were in your studies.
There is no better symbol of this than something called PUBDOCS, the
electronic forum where students freely share their class notes and summaries
with others without asking anything in return. How are we to make sense of
this grand tradition of generosity amongst students in the Faculty of Law in
an age of consumerism and individualism and against the background of a
culture of entitlement that characterizes much of the way in which law is
spoken to in everyday life?
Je me permets de tourner vers votre compagnon de classe, le nouveau
docteur Roy Lacaud Heenan, qui offre, par sa carrière exemplaire, une piste
d’explication pour la générosité exemplaire de la promotion 2008. Certes,
M. Heenan a connu un succès sans commune mesure dans le secteur privé
en fondant un cabinet d’avocats prospère et respecté. Mais de concert avec
cette activité professionnelle, il a toujours mené une espèce de pratique
parallèle, exercée « pro bono publico », pour le bien public. Que ce soit
comme membre de conseil d’un musée ou comme bénévole auprès de la
Faculté de droit de McGill, M. Heenan semble nous signaler que notre
pleine satisfaction comme juriste exige, à côté de l’activité centrée sur soimême, une bonne action civique posée en vue d’aider son prochain.
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The history of the Faculty is replete with graduates who led public-spirited
lives while maintaining active law practices in the private sector: from one
of the first graduates, Alexander Morris, B.C.L. 1850, whose law office was
a veritable social service agency for Quebec, helping the provinces’s firsts
schools and hospitals, to Samuel W. Jacobs, B.C.L. 1893, who spearheaded
an effort to help women enter the legal professions from his law office and
founded the Canadian Jewish Congress in his spare time.
Graduates of this great Faculty that I have met over recent months are
equally engaged trying to make the legal community better serve the public.
Take the example of Bernard Amyot, B.C.L., LL.B. 1983 – a partner of Roy
Heenan’s firm and the volunteer President of the Canadian Bar Association,
who has spoken out powerfully against the assault on the judiciary and the
rule of law in Pakistan; or recent graduate Robert Israel, B.C.L., LL.B. 2006
who has not only helped law students found Innocence McGill, but who has
worked tirelessly in service of those wrongly convicted without any hope of
financial return to himself.
Our graduates are not only bâtonniers and law society benchers, but chairs of
hospital boards, libraries, charitable foundations, volunteers at the YMCA
pressing the organizational skills they acquired as lawyers to advocate for
the public good. This is pro bono publico, and speaks to a life of sharing the
gift of one’s legal education – financed as it was in part by the whole
community – in the public square. This fine McGill tradition reminds us that
we will be ultimately unhappy with the great dignity of a legal education
unless we somehow give back to the community that helped us become
jurists.
McGill law graduates seem to have a special taste for volunteering at
universities. In that spirit I salute our Chancellor Dick Pound who proudly
bears, like you, his degree of Bachelor of Civil Law in his role as (in the
words of our Principal) the “volunteer-in-chief” of McGill. Roy Heenan’s
unswerving devotions to higher education – as a teacher himself in the
Faculty, as the Chair of the Trudeau Foundation, through his commitment to
arts education – offers us a model career that balances professional
achievement and the public good. Sometimes in the harried professional
lives lawyers lead, there is a sense that the noble aspirations that brought
many of us to the Faculty get scuttled by a ‘system’ that prizes profit over
public service. But there are thousands of examples of McGill grads deeply
engaged in public life without living that life on a 9-to-5 basis. Roy
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Heenan’s path does a wonderful job of reminding jurists everywhere,
including those in so-called alternative careers, about what it means to be a
public-spirited person educated in the law. Vivre dans la cité, guidé par un
souci constant de l’altérité – voici le message que je retiens de cet esprit de
groupe qui anime la promotion de 2008, qui se vérifie aisément en mesurant
le bénévolat que vous avez fait, grâce à votre association Pro Bono McGill,
auprès d’Option consommateurs, le Native Friendship Centre, Educaloi,
Equitas, Project Genesis, le Conseil canadien des réfugiés, chez Doris, et
ailleurs.
It also reminds your professors that a legal education extend beyond the
classroom and off the transcript to move into the public square. And it would
seem, in observing how your teachers are themselves involved in civic life
beyond McGill, that they share your view of engaged community life. I have
colleagues devoting themselves to animal rights, on boards of youth
orchestras, churches and synagogues, working at the Sierra Club and Égale
Canada, coaching soccer and presiding over daycares. They also spend
uncounted hours helping one another – mentoring, community building – in
ways that sometimes go unnoticed. Please allow me to make special mention
this morning of Professor Jane Mathews Glenn – one of this University’s
great, public-spirited, community builders – who joined the Faculty in 1971
as the first woman career law professor. Professor Glenn retires this summer
after thirty-seven years of accomplished service to others at McGill
University during which time, in a thousand different ways, she quietly
helped so many community members with their careers. Part of the identity
of Jane Glenn the law teacher, like that of Roy Heenan the law graduate and
that evinced by you during your stay here as law students, is wrapped up in
an ideal of engaged citizenship, in the public good. Bravo ma chère Jane.
On peut donc bien prétendre que cette idée de pro bono publico n’en est pas
une à côté des heures facturables ou en dehors de la vie professionnelle mais
elle est indissociable à ce que c’est d’être un juriste. Nos diplômes
comportent, certes, des « droits et des privilèges », mais ils nous engagent
aussi à nous réaliser, en partie, dans une action menée pour le bien public,
dans la cité. Undertaking this working is sometimes itself commodified by
law firms and others who demand pro bono activity as part of a business
model, as if public-spiritedness is to be commodified and marketed along
with other legal skills. I implore you to bring some of the generosity of this
class into those professional circles that you will someday be leading and
remind those that helping one’s fellow citizens is, for a jurist, both an end
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unto itself and a way to give meaning to one’s life and one’s legal education.
It occurs to me that one way for this great group of friends in the class of
2008 to stay together is to remain engaged, together, in the public-spirited
life that you have led here through your lifetime membership in the
community of graduates at McGill University.
In any event, this deeply generous class class has given me a renewed faith
in legal education and in the legal profession. For that, and for much more, I
offer profound thanks to each of you.
Longue vie à la promotion 2008.
Nicholas Kasirer
Dean of Law
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