Brian dickson biography

Robert George Brian Dickson PC CC CD (May 25, 1916 – October 17, 1998) was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and judge who served as the 15th chief.
Robert George Brian Dickson PC CC CD was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and judge who served as the 15th chief justice of Canada from 1984 to 1990 and as a puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1973 to 1984.
Brian Dickson shocked his partners by accepting an appointment as a Manitoba trial judge in 1963.

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by Robert Sharpe, Justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and Professor Kent Roach, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.
Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2003.

After coming of age during the Depression on the Prairies, being severely wounded in World War II, and after a career as a successful and prosperous corporate lawyer, Brian Dickson shocked his partners by accepting an appointment as a Manitoba trial judge in 1963.

Over the next twenty seven years, including seventeen at the Supreme Court of Canada, Dickson emerged as one of Canada’s greatest judges.

The Dickson years at the Supreme Court were a time of unprecedented constitutional controversy and legal change.

On his arrival, the Court was preoccupied with routine disputes; by his retirement as Chief Justice in 1990, the Court had become a major national institution and the Court’s decisions were the subject of intense public interest and concern.

As this biography of Chief Justice Dickson demonstrates, this striking transformation in the Canadian judicial system was matched by his own

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When Brian Dickson was appointed in 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada was preoccupied with run-of-the-mill disputes. By the time he retired as Chief Justice of Canada in 1990, the Court had become a major national institution, very much in the public eye. The Court's decisions, reforming large areas of private and public law under the Charter of Rights, were the subject of intense public interest and concern.Brian Dickson played a leading role in this transformation. Engaging and incisive, Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey traces Dickson's life from a Depression-era boyhood in Saskatchewan, to the battlefields of Normandy, the boardrooms of corporate Canada and high judicial office, and provides an inside look at the work of the Supreme Court during its most crucial period. Dickson's journey was an important part of the evolution of the Canadian judiciary and of Canada itself. Sharpe and Roach have written an accessible biography of one of Canada's greatest legal figures that provides new insights into the work of Canada's highest court.

University of Toronto Press

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Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey

Two distinguished authors (one a senior Ontario appellate judge, the
other a leading legal professor) have teamed up to produce this
path-breaking biography of one of Canada’s most important jurists.
Brian Dickson followed an unlikely road to become Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of Canada. He was a soldier in World War II, and then a
corporate lawyer and businessman in Winnipeg, before surprising everyone
he knew by accepting an appointment to become a trial judge in Manitoba
in 1963. Dickson would go on to become an ideal judge. He had a
prodigious appetite for work, an inherent sympathy for the average
person who came before his court, and a balanced approach to
interpreting and making the law. As a member of the highest court in the
land in 1973, and chief justice from 1984, Dickson was in the right
place at the right time to have a profound impact on the social and
political life in Canada. The advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedoms meant that in a few short years, the court reinvented
Canadian law to define and protec