Judging Bertha Wilson

1133 Words5 Pages
Judging Bertha Wilson: Law as Large as Life by Ellen Anderson Book Review Women have achieved many great things since 1914. They have gained better education and if it wasn't for certain women we would never been acknowledged as a "person." Ellen Anderson has created the first biography of Canada's first woman Supreme Court judge, Bertha Wilson. This is a book that is long overdue, given that Madam Justice Wilson's historic importance as a jurist in Canada. The book is defined on the cover as an intellectual biography observing interviews with Bertha Wilson, her husband John Wilson, and many relatives, friends and contemporaries of her. The book displays many fascinating phases of Wilson’s life, beginning with her childhood in Scotland where she studied philosophy at University of Aberdeen; her courtship and nuptial with John Wilson; moving to Canada; her legal career at Osler law firm; her promotion as the first woman on the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1976; her work on Gender Equality; and her employment to the Supreme Court. It is undeniable that Justice Wilson made a change. It is very likely that Wilson’s gender and her practices with discrimination moulded her personality and her attitude to judging. For the most part, this is a book that dichotomizes Wilson’s legal choices and published literature about law. Anderson senses a chain of influences on Wilson’s lawful expertise: her study on philosophy, her influence from the Scottish church. Anderson composes this complicated academic context through more than two hundred pages of legal examination of the criminal family, misdemeanour, agreement, faith, tax, executive, global, evidence, work, property, human rights, immigration, Aboriginal, and legal cases that Bertha Wilson judged over her profession. Numerous prospective readers of Bertha Wilson’s biography will be feminists, homosexuals, and others who
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