Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J. L. Cohen 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 real 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 modern industrial relations legislation. He was exceptionally bright, dedicated and hard- working, with the result that he left his mark on much of the labour law which emerged before and during the Second World War, including minimum employment standards, unemployment insurance, and collective bargaining legislation. Although his main focus was the representation of unions and the pursuit of industrial democracy, he was also a civil libertarian before there was a Charter of Rights, and his clients included unionists, poor people, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and wartime internees. MacDowell gives us a skilful and layered portrait of a prickly man who was fiercely committed to his work and to his clients, and who was both admired for his expertise, and despised by the Toronto legal establishment. Cohen was born in England to Lithuanian Jewish parents, who joined the migration of eastern European Jews to Toronto in the early 1900’s. His family life included weekly political discussion groups with socialist, union, or Zionist themes, and Cohen, the eldest of six, was encouraged to do well in school by his supportive father. When he was thirteen, however, his father fell through ice in the course of his travels in Northern Ontario and drowned. This was devastating for Cohen, who then became the breadwinner of the family. He cobbled together various sources of income, worked and took correspondence courses, and eventually became a lawyer by articling at a law firm for two years while attending lectures. MacDowell does an excellent job of evoking the political and social climate of the day, pointing out that among other things, Cohen was entering a profession that was rife with anti-Semitism. Jews were not hired by established firms, and generally had to start their own practices, serving their own communities and supplementing their incomes with non-legal work. Her description of this is highlighted by the startling fact that Bora Laskin, then equipped with an LL.M. from Harvard, and later to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, was refused a position by every single law firm he contacted. MacDowell builds up …