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9 Legal Service Bull. 83 (1984)
The Law Union of Ontario

handle is hein.journals/alterlj9 and id is 89 raw text is: LAW UNION Activist lawyers organise The Law Union of Ontario Robert Martin The Law Union of Ontario is the result of the desire of a small group of lawyers in one advanced capit- alist society to engage, in an organised fashion, in progressive political and legal work. This has been neither an easy nor an entirely successful task but progressive legal workers in Australia may find the experience of the Law Union helpful in assessing their own structures and practice. PRE-HISTORY The genesis of the Law Union dates back to the summer of 1967. At that time a group of students at the Univer- sity of Toronto, along with one lawyer, formed the Village Bar, an organisation seeking to offer legal servi- ces, which concretely meant protection against the police, to the large number of young people who had been attracted to Toronto's Yorkville area. The Village Bar, to the considerable consternation of the Ontario legal profession, operated Canada's first street legal clinic. While the Village Bar as such was short-lived, during 1968 and 1969 legal advice was dis- pensed from a trailer parked in a vacant lot near the Yorkville area. Indeed, throughout its subsequent his- tory, the Law Union has remained attached to the same area of Toronto. The trailer project involved several law- yers and a number of University of Toronto law stu- dents. A significant amount of the work was directed at counselling US citizens opposed to the war in Vietnam who were then arriving in Toronto in substantial num. bers. The point of this pre-history of the Law Union is to note that, prior to its formation, a group of people in Toronto, of generally progressive political inclinations, had acquired the experience of working together in unorthodox forms of lawyering. THE FIRST LAW UNION On 9 May 1970 there were major demonstrations all across North America protesting against the US inva- sion of Cambodia. One of these was held outside the Consulate-General of the US in downtown Toronto. Many people were arrested. The defence of these people against subsequent criminal prosecutions was coordina- ted out of the office of the firm of Copeland, Ruby, the founders of which had worked together on the trailer pro- ject. A degree of cohesiveness began to develop amongst the lawyers involved, and after a series of meetings during the summer of 1970 it was decided to form the Law Union. The Law Union's first public act was to or- ganise a demonstration in Toronto in October 1970 against the Canadian Government's invocation of emer- gency powers under the War Measures Act. While critics of the Trudeau Government's action are plentiful today, the stand taken by the Law Union was far from popular at the time. The Law Union did not fare well and within a year it had disappeared. There seem to have been two reasons for this. First, like many other organisations, it fell vic- tim to that strain of leftism which was rampant in North America at the time - spontaneist, unreflective, ill- organised and strong on rhetoric. The second reason is peculiar to the Law Union. While the first Law Union was more than simply the political arm of Copeland, Ruby, that firm was perceived by many of the members to be at the heart of the Law Union, and by the second half of 1971 Copeland, Ruby was breaking up. The first Law Union was never formally dissolved. It just stopped. No further meetings were held. As one corn- mentator put it; 'the Law Union ran out of steam'. THE SECOND LAW UNION The second coming of the Law Union was reminiscent of its birth. They both grew out of progressive political activity. A long, bitter strike began in 1973 at the Artis- tic Woodworking Plant in Toronto. Pickets were arrested and a group of lawyers, many of whom had known each- other since the Village Bar days, came together to or- ganise the defence. As Brian fher put it later in the Law Union Newsletter: Out of this activity came the feeling that the lawyers and law students could have been much more effec- tive if there had been greater communication among themselves, more discussion of the alternatives avail- able to them, and better coordination of legal activi- ties and prospects undertaken. The strike had provi- ded an opportunity, too, for the lawyers especially, to develop methods for working collectively, to coun- teract the individualistic nature of most legal work. Discussions about resuscitating the Law Union fol- lowed, and in May 1974 it was announced that a meet- ing would be held at the University of Toronto to ach- ieve the 'revival' of the Law Union. The Law Union came back into existence and has persisted, in essen- tially the same form, throughout the intervening decade. STRUCTURE AND ORGANISATION The existing structure of the Law Union was established by a General Meeting held on 29 September 1974. Mem- bership was to be open to ... anyone who is a member of the legal profession, including, but not limited to, students at an accredi- ted law school, articling students, enrolees of the Bar Admission Course, or its equivalent, law advocates, law clerks, legal secretaries, employees of government legal institutions, lawyers and members of the judi- ciary. Provision is also made for Affiliate Members. The membership fees are determined according to thie in- come of the member. As of 14 November 1974, the Law April 1984

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