The greatest lawyer of the ancient world, Cicero, proclaimed that where there is life, there is hope. It seems to me that one can adapt that saying to the inspiration for retaining the right to a jury trial in the modern world, despite all the potential hazards that individual juries might present to the accused […]
The Book That Didn’t Bark: Forster’s Maurice
November 2, 2018 By Rob Normey
You have no doubt heard the expression “the dog that didn’t bark – a wonderful phrase emanating from an old Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle. I would like to conduct a little touch of literary sleuthing and ask why E.M Forster, eminent English novelist, declined decade after decade to publish the one and […]
Lawyers in Revolutionary Times: Doctor Zhivago
August 31, 2018 By Rob Normey
A remarkable manuscript was bundled out of the Soviet Union in the late spring of 1956. An Italian Communist journalist named Sergio d’Angelo had visited Boris Pasternak to discuss possible publication of his latest work. Pasternak was the famed Russian poet and survivor of the various purges and show trials of the Great Terror that […]
Sisyphus Ascending: The Remarkable Career of Raja Shehadeh
July 4, 2018 By Rob Normey
I have just read a wonderful narrative by the Palestinian human rights lawyer, activist, and now writer of the first rank, Raja Shehadeh. The author lives in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which has been under occupation by Israeli forces for 51 years and counting. The book, A Rift in Time: Travels With My Ottoman […]
Breaking the Code, and then Breaking the Spirit
May 4, 2018 By Rob Normey
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms case, (Delwyn) Vriend v. Alberta. There was some fine reporting in the Edmonton Journal and elsewhere on the case, including where Delwyn Vriend is now and what his experiences have been in the struggle to see gay rights entrenched in […]
