Even in the endless controversy over SNC-Lavalin’s attempts to secure a deferred prosecution agreement and what the Prime Minister’s Office may or may not have done to aid those efforts, it was difficult to miss one recurring plot point.
“It began to sound to me like the line from The Untouchables, which is, ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight,’ ” says Eric Adams, a law professor specializing in constitutional law and legal history at the University of Alberta. “Do we want to be creating an elite cadre of super-lawyers who appear to have—both in the public mind and certainly in media reporting—a kind of extra-legal status?”
What underpins all of this is a culture of “enormous deference” toward the Supreme Court, says Emmett Macfarlane, an associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. Canadians may disagree with certain decisions of the court, but there is a perception that when it decides, it is generally right, and has the weight of the Constitution behind it.
Regulators have started to examine this. New Law Society of Ontario rules dictate that a former Supreme Court judge “shall not appear as counsel or advocate in any court, or in chambers, or before any administrative board or tribunal without the express approval of a panel,” which would only be granted in “exceptional circumstances.” Other provinces mandate a three-year cooling-off period.
Salyzyn believes former SCC judges should be prohibited from practising law at all, because even if they never step foot into a courtroom and only do behind-the-scenes legal work, they still carry the power and prestige of their former role. There are limitations on how lawyers can market their services; the model code forbids any advertising “suggesting qualitative superiority to other lawyers.
We should always respect and honor the experience which they possess, they have been in the system and they have seen it all done first hand. We should listen with a sincere devotion, if we really want to learn.
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Source: macleans - 🏆 19. / 71 Read more »