Here’s something for you lawyers aged 40 and up - or perhaps the odd precocious 35-plus - to do on a slow afternoon around the office. Give your young associates and students a pop quiz asking two questions: Do you know who Rumpole is?
Do you know who Paul Magder is . . . or at the very least what he did . . . or, that there was a time in the dark ages when we couldn’t shop on Sunday around these parts? And prepare to lose brain cells.
That is because we bet it will be just like what happened around the Law Times newsroom when the (not really) “old lady,” ie Editrix, was spurred to inquire of our esteemed legal writers if they knew the answers to the same questions.
NONE of them had ever heard of Rumpole of the Bailey, much less its creator John Mortimer. The blank looks reminded us of a deer’s face just before it meets a windshield on a dark highway. To their credit, they did jump on their computers and consult the Internet for the answer.
As for Paul Magder, we were rewarded with one “vaguely” for our trouble. The rest, a resounding “nope.” And a return to their trusty keyboards.
Now, of course we’re not suggesting they should have known, these fine, intelligent, talented young men aged 32 and below. But with the recent passing of Mortimer and justice Sydney Harris (the judge who decided the Paul Magder Furs case), it just made us ask the questions.
And then, the surprising answers made us wonder how much what we of a certain age think should be obvious knowledge has gone by the wayside.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, some of us have jumped the shark. (A Happy Days reference that may go over the whippersnappers’ heads.)
In Robert Todd’s lovely story about Mortimer’s death, he quotes dean Ian Holloway of the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Law: “What Mortimer did so well was cast the lawyer as human. Striving for a noble cause, as I believe we are as lawyers, but someone who’s not without his foibles. He drank too much, smoked, had pet peeves, and biases, and so on.” As Todd writes, Mortimer cut to the core of the profession.
Harris, meanwhile, at 91, was remembered as a defender of rights. He’s the judge who in 1978 acquitted gay magazine Body Politic and three officers of Pink Triangle Press of charges of possession and distribution of obscene materials.
In 1988 he sent NHLer Dino Ciccarelli to jail for an on-ice attack against Leaf Luke Richardson. And in the 1980s he dismissed charges against Magder’s fur shop for opening on Sundays when shopping on the Sabbath was not legal.
Harris, it’s been written, also was an advocate for legislation to broaden civil liberties and human rights; pushed for Criminal Code changes against hate literature; opposed capital punishment; and was against religious education in public schools.
He was also a booster of civil rights south of the border and in 1963 met with Martin Luther King Jr.
Harris died three days before President Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first black man to ascend to that height - the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
We wonder how many other fighters for freedom have fallen off the public consciousness. Sure shopping on Sunday isn’t anywhere near the right to vote or having public medicine. But, given that we’ve just seen history unfolding in the U.S., it’s a good time to think about the freedoms that didn’t exist when you were born.
These days we believe we’re so educated with this incredible access to information. But access isn’t information; you have to have a frame of reference to seek it out. So, while the loss of people like Harris and Mortimer is sad, marking the passages makes the rest of us consider - at least for a few minutes in our busy days - those who did the things that have become the fabric of our lives.
- Gretchen Drummie
