by Robert Sharpe, Justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and Professor Kent Roach, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.
Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2003.
After coming of age during the Depression on the Prairies, being severely wounded in World War II, and after a career as a successful and prosperous corporate lawyer, Brian Dickson shocked his partners by accepting an appointment as a Manitoba trial judge in 1963.
Over the next twenty seven years, including seventeen at the Supreme Court of Canada, Dickson emerged as one of Canada’s greatest judges.
The Dickson years at the Supreme Court were a time of unprecedented constitutional controversy and legal change.
On his arrival, the Court was preoccupied with routine disputes; by his retirement as Chief Justice in 1990, the Court had become a major national institution and the Court’s decisions were the subject of intense public interest and concern.
As this biography of Chief Justice Dickson demonstrates, this striking transformation in the Canadian judicial system was matched by his own personal transformation.
Justice Robert Sharpe and Professor Kent Roach have written an engaging and accessible biography of one of Canada’s greatest legal figures.
