The Law Society Of Upper Canada And Ontario's Lawyers, 1797-1997 (heritage)

It is an authoritative and lively history of the Law Society of Upper Canada and of Ontario's lawyers, from the founding of the Society by ten lawyers in 1797, to the crises which shook the society and the legal profession in the mid-1990s.

At the end of the eighteenth century, when ten lawyers gathered in what is now Niagara-on-the-Lake to form the Law Society of Upper Canada, they were creating something new in the world: a professional organization with statutory authority to control its membership and govern its own affairs. Today's Law Society of Upper Canada, with more than 25,000 members, still wields these powers. Marking the bicentennial of the society's foundation, Christopher Moore's history begins by exploring the unprecedented step taken in 1797 and follows the evolution of lawyers' work and the idea of professional autonomy through two hundred years of growth and change.

The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers is a broad-ranging story of the growth and development of the Law Society and the legal profession, from the days when horseback barristers travelled the backwoods by horseback, through the reforms of the late nineteenth century to the period of reaction between the two world wars and the long struggle of women and minorities for access to and equity in the legal profession. Writing in a style that is scholarly as well as entertaining, Moore traces to the present a story rich in personalities, and shows how, after a period of tremendous growth and change, questions of governance, legal aid, and practice insurance triggered a series of crises that rocked the society to its foundations.

This is the first study to be based on full access to the society's two hundred years of historical records. Moore, who has organized his research into themes and periods to illuminate the story, also includes new material on the lives and careers of Ontario lawyers and on the place of the Law Society in professional and public life. Readable and extensively illustrated, The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers shows that such issues as professional autonomy and the internal organization, at the forefront of debate at the society's inception, continue to dominiate discussions today.

In the last decade before the Law Society's 1997 bicentenary, Ontario's lawyers began a revolution in how they were represented in convocation. Since the start of bencher elections in 1871, convocation had been only notionally a representative body. Members of the profession had chosen their elders and betters, rather than lawyers like themselves, to lead and govern the profession. That began to change in the mid-1980s, and it was women lawyers who made it decisive ... They were not only electing more women. They were ending the unchallenged supremacy of establishment barristers over Law Society policy. Convocation for the first time acquired a caucus of younger lawyers who were of less professional prominence than the typical bencher. They were conscious of representing less prestigious (and less remunerative) areas of practice, and they tended to be sceptical of many of the ruling assumptions of the older male benchers they had joined. The core of this new caucus was female, but more than gender divided it from the old guard. 'I was elected, I suspect, by lawyers who feel excluded by the law society and who serve clients who feel excluded from power, ' said one of them. From The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers, 1797-1997. -- Back cover In July 1797, ten of the fifteen lawyers in Upper Canada gathered at Wilson's Hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake to establish the Law Society of Upper Canada. Half of them were under thirty; the youngest was nineteen. The organization they were founding, a professional organization with statutory authority to control its membership and govern its own affairs, had no parallel anywhere else in the common-law world Contents 5 Preface 7 Chapter One. Becoming Learned and Honourable, 1797-1822 11 Chapter Two. Lawyers for the Emerging Giant, 1822-1871 65 Chapter Three. A New Profession, 1871-1914 135 Chapter Four. The Last Patricians, 1914-1950 187 Chapter Five. A New Agenda, 1950-1970 235 Chapter Six. Questions of Control, 1970-1997 281 Appendices 341 Acknowledgments 351 Notes 353 Index 383