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Law Students

: A New Chapter

Justice Rothstein

By James

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Dal has a program called law hour where the law hour committee gets different speakers to come in and give a talk. This year so far we've had such notable speakers as Liberal MP Michael Ingantieff, Author of "When Lawyers Go Bad" Philip Slayton and today we had Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Supreme Court of Canada as a speaker.

Justice Rothstein is an excellent speaker. He is captivating, inviting and incredibly funny. I overheard one student suggest that he should be called "Chief Justice Seinfeld" (even though he is not the Chief Justice). The talk he gave was about beign the first Supreme Court Judge to go through the new procedure whereby MPs in the House of Commons were able to ask him questions before he was appointed. The talk was really interesting and he finished with a hilarious story about one of the effects of receiving more publicity as a result of the new appointment process.

A few weeks after being appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Rothstein had to call Air Canada to book some travel for personal reasons. While talking he gave the agent his name. She paused and said, "Hey, aren't you the guy they just appointed to the Supreme Court?"

"Yes, that's me," he replied.

The agent absorbed the information for a moment and then stated "I have a question."

"Yes?"

"Every morning I go to work really early in the morning. It's usually dark out and when I'm waiting for the bus, often there's a big raccoon around. This raccoon really scares me, am I allowed to kill it?"

Justice Rothstein was a little taken aback. Although many non-lawyers think that there's black letter law with a right or wrong answer, usually the answer to legal questions is 'maybe'. In this case, Justice Rothstein started thinking that yes, there probably was a municipal bylaw or criminal code section about killing wild animals, but then there are also issues of self defence or public safety. After thinking for a short time, he responded "Hmmm, I don't know."

"What?" she replied "What do you mean you don't know? You're a Supreme Court Judge, Aren't you supposed to know all the laws?"

Full post as published by A New Chapter on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).