Andrée Lajoie

AUCTIONEERS, FENCE-VIEWERS, POPES – AND JUDGES

It is a measure of the charac ter of late 20th century Canadian society that the judicial function — the appointm ent, remuneration, governance and discipline of judges — has become a “hot-button” issue around which politicians can m arshall electora l argumen t, lobbies can muster public support, and university research centres can sponsor conferenc es. The inten sity of interest and comment appears to be a relatively novel phenomenon for jurists in common law provinces. Not so, however, for those of us from Quebec. The great disputes of the first forty years of this century about the insensitivity of the higher courts (and of the Supreme Court of Canad a in particular) to the civil law tradition are of exactly the same order as those now being raised in Alberta a nd elsew here.