Martin Friedland’s recent book My Life in Crime and Other Academic Adventures is both a personal memoir and a lively review of much that has happened in Canadian legal policy during the last forty years.
Friedland, now university professor emeritus of law at the University of Toronto, believes hazard and happenstance drive developments in law and legal policy more often than we might admit. He says the same about his own life. His career as an academic lawyer, he says, was not the result of focused ambition. His important work has often come along by accident.
Well, yes. But even when he was a new professor, a colleague nicknamed him “Friedland Enterprises” for the vigour of his research and the many public policy forums to which he applied it. Endless curiosity, hard work, and organization, and an ever-questioning mind - these all helped prepare the soil in which luck and chance could blossom.
Most of My Life in Crime explores the many public policy inquiries to which Friedland has contributed over the years. He advised on the regulation of gambling and other questions of public morality. He did one of the early studies of gun control. He reported on regulation of the securities industry. He contributed to studies of the structure of the courts, legal aid, national security law, wrongful conviction, and military justice reform.
He did significant research on double jeopardy and on bail and detention before trial. He helped plan the Law Reform Commission and was a founding commissioner. He has examined judicial independence and judicial salaries.
Any lawyer or student interested in these issues will find much of value in Friedland’s survey of each - and may be surprised at how lively and engaging Friedland’s narratives of them are. Throughout, he mixes the public policy story with a funny, upbeat, unpretentious autobiography that testifies to his myriad friendships, his relentless enthusiasm for new experience, his gift for team building and, it seems, his unfailingly sunny outlook.
Again and again Friedland wryly reports on 40 years’ experience of how public agencies have commissioned research from him and then, almost by reflex, have tried to censor or suppress the findings. Indeed, if there is a consistent theme in the memoir, it may be his concern for misuses of authority.
Not just governmental or police authority, either. Friedland questions judicial authority as well, skewering judges’ determination to be judges in their own case when it comes to determining their salaries. In an era when the Charter is sometimes taken as the be-all and end-all of Canadian law, Friedland writes that the Charter-era Supreme Court’s “overly ambitious approach to reforming the criminal law has in fact held back rational development of the law through the legislative route” (page 282).
Letting Parliament take the lead in shaping public policy is a matter, he says, not of legitimacy but of “institutional competency.” The judges, he thinks, disagree.
In 1979 a colleague in Israel told Friedland how “thrilling” archival research could be, and Friedland plunged in. He first explored the curious way that a criminal code drafted by 19th century English scholar R.S. Wright was supplanted throughout the commonwealth by the “more authoritarian” rival code of James Fitzjames Stephen.
That “wonderful experience” as legal historian led him to write a trilogy of true crime narrative histories (The Trials of Israel Lipski, The Case of Valentine Shortis, and The Death of Old Man Rice). These in turn led to his magnificent history of the University of Toronto in 2002.
Friedland writes in the voice of a lucky man, one who has been kept busy, kept entertained, and kept useful over many years. He is still advising on policy matters hither and yon, still mulling research worth returning to, and even thinking of a novel or two. Friedland Enterprises is still a going concern.
My Life in Crime and Other Academic Adventures by Martin L. Friedland was published in 2007 by University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.
Christopher Moore is the author of McCarthy Tétrault: Building Canada’s Premier Law Firm and other works in legal history. His web site is www.christophermoore.ca.
