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Article Excerpt
by Laurel Sefton MACDOWELL, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 385 pp., ISBN 0-8020-3513-2.
Lawyers occupy an odd place in North American popular culture, functioning as both heroes and villains with equal verisimilitude. Our ambivalence about them in this regard is unusual. For most occupations, we know where we stand, at least in popular culture terms. We love doctors, for instance, and we hate drug dealers. When it comes to lawyers, however, for some reason we are able to toggle easily between the image of a lawyer as a mercenary shark, and the lawyer as a champion of the underdog, not to mention a host of images in between these poles. Our television and movie screens are virtually crowded with lawyers: washed-up lawyers, neurotic waif lawyers, corrupt lawyers, alcoholic lawyers, sexpot lawyers, ruthless lawyers, noble lawyers, incompetent lawyers, keen lawyers, obsessed lawyers, novice lawyers, idealistic lawyers, and many more. There seems to be no end to our thirst for lawyer stories, and the line between our fictional lawyers and our real ones often becomes blurred. We make stories of our re al lawyers (witness Johnny Cochran and Marcia Clark), while our fictional lawyers often seem disconcertingly life-like.
All this is by way of introducing a lawyer and his story, in the form of Laurel Sefton MacDowell's biography of J. L. Cohen. MacDowell has created a comprehensive picture of a brilliant labour lawyer who spent years building a unique professional career, only to see it destroyed as a result of a disastrous mistake.
Cohen was a labour lawyer before there was labour law in Ontario, or at least before the advent of modem industrial relations legislation. He was exceptionally bright,...
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Books received. (Livres Recus)., January 01, 2003
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