McLachlin, Beverley

▪ 2001

      On Jan. 12, 2000, 71 years after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not “persons,” Beverley McLachlin was sworn in as the court's first woman chief justice. In her inaugural address McLachlin stated that the court would be dealing with difficult cases in such areas as child pornography, gun registry, mercy killing, computer crime, and Internet copyrights. She also promised that the court would not act in isolation, declaring, “We understand that our decisions, while true to the law and its traditions, do not stand in abstraction from society. They affect real people in life. They have consequences.” The dynamic McLachlin replaced Antonio Lamer, who resigned after a decade as chief justice.

      McLachlin was born Sept. 7, 1943, near Pincher Creek, Alta. In recalling her childhood on a farm in Alberta, she said, “We didn't have much money. We struggled, but we lived on land we loved and, like so many Canadian farm families, we did whatever was required to make a living from it.” Educated at the University of Alberta, she earned a B.A. in 1964 and an M.A. in philosophy and a law degree in 1968. She practiced law with several firms in Alberta and British Columbia from 1969 to 1975 and served as a professor of law at the University of British Columbia from 1974 to 1981. In 1981 McLachlin was appointed to the Supreme Court of British Columbia, and in 1985 she was named to the Court of Appeal of that province. She was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1988 and in 1989 took her seat as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. McLachlin brought to the bench skills as an able administrator as well as a fluency in English and French; she was also a prolific writer. Her fellow justices praised McLachlin for her ability to blend theoretical principles of the law with practical applications for Canadians and predicted that she would be a strong and effective leader of the nation's highest court.

David R. Calhoun

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