Building Justice: Frank Iacobucci and the Life Cycles of Law

Few are the justices of a nation's highest court whose most significant work is done after they leave the bench. Fewer still are those magnanimous enough not to seek credit for it. Justice Frank Iacobucci, the man whose labors were instrumental to the creation of Canada's newest federal holiday—National Day for Truth and Reconciliation—is such an individual, Shauna Van Praagh tells us in this recent biography. Born in East Vancouver in 1937 to an Abruzzese father and a Calabrian mother, Iacobucci served as a Puisne Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1991 to 2004. Prior to his appointment, he had practiced in the private sector, been a professor and the dean of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and served as Deputy Minister of Justice and Deputy Attorney General of Canada.Despite this singular resume and the impact of his work as a justice—which Van Praagh treats in the book's longest chapter with the laudable goal of demystifying the Supreme Court rather than engaging in “glorification or . . . idolatry” (121) of its members—Iacobucci's greatest contribution to Canadian society came after 2004. In the following year, he was appointed as the federal government's representative in negotiations with the Assembly of First Nations and other organizations of Indigenous peoples aimed at reaching an equitable agreement between the government and survivors of the Indian residential schools. For over a century from their establishment in 1880, these schools separated Indigenous children from their families and lands with the express purpose of extirpating their ancestral culture. The schools were organized and run by several Christian churches but became a central pillar of governmental policy when their management was brought within the Department of Indian Affairs from the 1920s. In addition to extreme isolation, Indigenous children endured malnourishment and physical and sexual abuse. Hundreds of unmarked graves have been found on the former grounds of these schools.Small wonder then that Justice Iacobucci considers this work toward reconciliation, which was advanced significantly by the finalization of the landmark Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in May 2006, to be “the most satisfying task [he has] ever had as a lawyer” (230). Also crucial to this work was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2008 to travel across Canada and record the testimonies of survivors of the schools. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published over 4,000 pages of survivors’ testimonies and historical documents detailing this dark chapter of Canada's past. The bill to create a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation was passed unanimously in the Canadian Parliament and received royal assent on June 3, 2021.Building Justice positively insists upon the power of oral narrative, including in far more quotidian situations. This insistence determines the structure of the book, which is organized around the different perspectives of the three fictive individuals in one of the Justice's favorite stories. These three individuals, performing the same task, offer three different responses when asked what they are doing: “I'm cutting stone,” “I'm making $5 a day,” “I'm building a cathedral” (first encountered on p. xiii). The book emerged from a colloquium organized by Van Praagh on the occasion of Justice Iacobucci's 80th birthday, and it bears the hallmarks of an event interested primarily in collective discussion of the forms of societal engagement through the law. Van Praagh, who considers Justice Iacobucci a consummate mentor in her life, infuses the book with many stories told—and, crucially, retold—by and about her subject both to bring us into particular conversations and to try to immortalize his perspectives and experiences. This strategy works well when she, a law professor herself, recounts her own experiences teaching with Justice Iacobucci's opinions; of these, his 1999 judgment in Law v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration), [1999] 1 SCR 497 created a framework for courts’ evaluation of equality rights within section 15, which Van Praagh and others have termed “the equality section” (165), of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There are passages in the book devoted to several anthropological and literary theories of narrative that focus on the capacity of stories to create community. Fittingly, the anecdotes by and about him demonstrate just how many people, and from how many walks of life, wished to express their admiration of Justice Iacobucci.No book is free of errors and no reviewer is without complaint. There are several typographical mistakes, including an unfortunate “Corpus Christie College” (44) within the description of Justice Iacobucci's graduate study at the University of Cambridge. There are also passages, among them the opening ekphrasis, where subtler metaphor would have more creatively animated the “life cycles” of the book's subtitle. As mentioned, Van Praagh attempts to use stories about Justice Iacobucci in such a way that we feel both present in the moment they are told and compelled to sustain them by trying to realize their lessons. She may therefore engender a cyclicality through the reader who holds one of Iacobucci's lessons in mind and continues to aim at it. But Frank Iacobucci himself, in every stage of his life, must have had more intellectual influences than we find described in these pages. Surely he is still breathing life into ideas, and stories, of earlier jurists and philosophers: Justice Iacobucci may have claimed to see nothing “magical about courts” (122), but Van Praagh's descriptions of the goals of the colloquium do suggest something numinous and enduring about the law.The “life cycles of law” to which Justice Iacobucci is connected must have predated him as well. Although her subject is rendered undeniably personable by Van Praagh's biographic strategy, reliance so heavily upon others’ warm recollections risks moving Iacobucci beyond the realm of emulation, for those not personally acquainted, through the erasure of his faults and flaws. The inimitable can live on, but perhaps not as mentors—at least if confined to the page.

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