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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Laurel Sefton MacDowell, Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J.L. Cohen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). |
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JACOB LAWRENCE COHEN was one of Canada's first labour lawyers, a key architect of the post-World War II industrial-relations system, a proponent of unionization and collective bargaining for workers, and a defender of the right to free speech for radicals and communists at a time when they were openly discriminated against. Renegade Lawyer is an exploration of the life of the leading civil liberties and labour lawyer of the mid-20th century. |
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Laurel Sefton MacDowell casts J.L. Cohen as a virtual Jekyll and Hyde character, with a public face disguising a disturbing private life. Born in Manchester, England to Jewish immigrant working-class parents, Cohen emerged as a Toronto labour lawyer in the 1920s and practised until the 1940s. He advocated Marxism, yet never joined the Communist Party. There was scarcely a single major labour dispute in Canada from 1936 to 1945 in which Cohen was not involved. Cohen was recognized as the country's leading labour lawyer, defended the right to free speech for unpopular groups including Communists, trade unionists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, and was active at the provincial and federal levels in drafting collective bargaining legislation and sitting on conciliation boards. He was an arrogant litigator who made enemies in the legal profession and among non-Marxists in the labour movement. As a sole practitioner he was a loner, workaholic, womanizer, and, by the 1940s, a drug addict with severe health and mental problems who assaulted his secretary on a business trip. The nation's leading civil liberties lawyer in the 1940s went on trial in 1945 for assaulting his mistress and was subsequently disbarred. The decision to reinstate Cohen in 1950 was but a sad prelude to his death four months later. |
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The author applies her considerable knowledge of labour history to place Cohen within the context of the emerging collective bargaining system and examines the labour and civil liberties movements from the perspective of the legal profession. One of the book's central themes is Cohen's struggle between his views as a lawyer and as a Marxist. His early work defending Communists' free speech rights as counsel for the Canadian Labour Defence League became a battle between his own desire to win cases and free his clients, while the Communists were looking for martyrs and show trials. MacDowell's central focus, however, is less on the civil libertarian than it is on the labour lawyer. She argues that as a negotiator during key labour disputes such as the 1937 Oshawa strike and 1941 Kirkland Lake strike, as well as public policy maker in his drafts for an Ontario Unemployment Insurance Act and Collective Bargaining Act, and briefly as a member of the National War Labour Board, Cohen was a key figure in shaping public policy. The biographical approach offers a unique individualized perspective into the ideological divisions between Communists and Social Democrats during this period in organized labour and politics, culminating in Cohen's refusal in 1944 to run for the CCF as Member of Parliament as a result of the conflicts arising from his nomination. MacDowell also uses the life of a leading labour lawyer in the 1930s and 1940s to trace the shift in labour-capital relations from mass-based collective action towards closed-door bargaining sessions over contracts. |
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It is unfortunate that the author has chosen to avoid exploring the emergence of a small but organized civil liberties movement in the 1940s, given that Cohen was arguably the most important civil liberties lawyer in the 1930s and 1940s. References to the Civil Liberties Association of Toronto (CLAT) (166) are confused when the author later refers to a Canadian Civil Liberties Association (170) and the Civil Liberties Association (172). These references can be misleading since Canada did not possess a truly national civil liberties organization until the 1960s, and there were several different groups calling themselves civil liberties associations across the country at the time. It is surprising, given that the conflicts between Social Democrats and Communists are a central theme of this book, that the same battles within the civil liberties movement are not discussed. |
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Cohen's main contact with the organized civil liberties movement in the 1940s was the CLAT, which barely managed to fight off an attempt in 1942 by Communists to take control of its executive board. In 1946, Toronto became the centre of these ideological divisions when Communist members of CLAT formed a separate organization in response to the Gouzenko Affair. Cohen's decision to act as counsel for the accused spies in 1946 reflected similar divisions in the legal profession. Frank Scott and J.L. Cartwright consistently condemned censorship during the war and the deportation of Japanese Canadians, but neither offered a word of sympathy for the detention of accused Communist spies who were stripped of every legal protection almost a year after the war had ended (the former even became the lead Crown prosecutor for the spy trials). The author makes an error in stating that the Canadian Bar Association condemned the commission's tactics (214); in fact it voted against doing so despite the recommendations of its own civil liberties committee. It was no doubt influenced, among other things, by the fact that the Association's president at the time acted as lead counsel for the Royal Commission on Espionage. These issues need to be addressed in order to fully appreciate the political and ideological context in which this civil liberties lawyer lived and worked in the 1940s. |
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Renegade Lawyer's most notable contribution is in the form of a commentary on the post-war industrial relations settlement. Recent literature on social movements and labour history has lamented the undermining of mass mobilization in favour of back-room collective bargaining. MacDowell challenges this position and, from the perspective of the 1940's leading labour lawyer, argues that the protections established under the collective bargaining system constituted a substantial gain in a period when unions struggled for simple recognition of their right to exist. It is a significant historiographical debate and will likely stimulate some valuable discussion, but the author's decision to go so far as to completely dismiss critics of the postwar settlement for lacking "an understanding of the labour-relations system as it developed in Cohen's time or as it functions now" is excessive. (298) The past ten years have seen a flurry of literature on social movements dealing with, among others, the women's, gay rights/liberation, and student movements, and a biography of J.L. Cohen can only scratch the surface of such a vast debate. The author does, however, provide detailed footnotes and a bibliography for readers to consult further on these issues. |
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Renegade Lawyer is an essential contribution to the historiography on the labour and civil liberties movements in Canada, and the individual contribution of J.L. Cohen to these developments has too long been overlooked. |
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Dominique Clément,
Memorial University of Newfoundland
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