Philip Slayton

Twenty years ago I was a corporate lawyer on Bay Street. One of my firm’s clients was Campeau Corporation, a real estate company founded and led by the gifted and excitable Robert Campeau. Bob Campeau was a man of outsized personality and fierce temper. Campeau Corporation had borrowed a lot of money to buy two large…

Dennis Baker rails against Canadian constitutional orthodoxy. He refuses to exalt the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He will not genuflect to senior judges and eminent professors, the Charter’s high priests. He enthusiastically bashes what he calls the “legal elite.” Despite these stimulating qualities, Baker’s Not Quite Supreme: The Courts and Coordinate Constitutional Interpretation is unlikely to make it off university reading lists into main street…

Who was Ivan Rand, who was born in 1884 and died in 1969? Does anyone, apart from the legal history cognoscenti, have the foggiest idea? The lawyer and judge seems like just another bygone establishment figure who quickly faded into obscurity once dead. And yet, William Kaplan—well-known lawyer, arbitrator and author—has written a hefty biography of this historical…