An Activist’s Approach to the Practice of Law
Litton factory in 1983
Throughout all material times (as lawyers say), I was a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto.
The article reproduced below, however, is about law, not mathematics.
It describes some strategies that I and others developed to use trials of demonstrators to further the causes that they had been demonstrating about.
In 1968, I was arrested during a demonstration protesting the United States’ war against Vietnam. In the middle of my trial, I dismissed my lawyer and took over representing myself. I was acquitted of one of the two offences that I had been charged with and was convicted of the other. I won my appeal of the conviction. So, I am not a criminal.
I found that I liked the contest aspects of a trial. I also realized that legal cases could provide opportunities to promote my left-wing ideals. I started acting as a paralegal. (At the time, there was no licensing of paralegals.) I represented demonstrators who were charged with minor offences, injured workers fighting for compensation, and a student who had been expelled from the University of Toronto’s medical school.
A number of years later, I decided to go to law school. I was very busy doing both mathematics and law, but I made it. I graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto in 1990. I was called to the Ontario bar in 1992.
From 1992 until I retired in 2018, I was very busy doing a number of cases.
The above is an interesting (I think) story that I intend to write about elsewhere. The outline above suffices to provide context to the article below.
Many of the cases I did as a paralegal were defending people who had been charged with offences for blocking the entrance to a factory in Toronto that produced guidance systems for cruise missiles for the United States.
The article reproduced below discusses some of those trials.
Even now, thirty years after I wrote it, the article still describes the essence of my approach to using law to contribute to fighting for social justice.
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