Selick
Continued From Page 5
component at that. Indeed, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the
U.S. Supreme Court said in
1999: “As between [written]
briefing and argument, there is
a near-universal agreement
among federal appellate judges
that the brief is more important—certainly more enduring.
Oral argument is fleeting—here
today, it may be forgotten tomorrow, after the court has heard
perhaps six or seven subsequent
arguments.” Eugene Meehan, a
Canadian lawyer with extensive
SCC experience, has made similar observations.
But just in case, the Supreme
Court has numerous additional
resources available to it, especially these days: videos of the
oral arguments, transcripts in
both official languages, the fac-tums filed by counsel, the decisions of all the courts below, the
commentary written by academics as the case worked its way up
the appeal ladder, the opportunity to discuss the issues with
their colleagues, and the opportunity to have their law clerks
ferret out any obscure points
requiring clarification.
attain full bilingualism out of
commercial necessity.
Anglophones fear, with some
justification, that the sought-
after linguistic skills will come
bundled with a particular ideol-
ogy. By imposing a seemingly
neutral linguistic requirement,
parliament might actually be
imposing a minority philosophy
or worldview on the unwitting
majority. Is this result inadver-
tent, or deliberate? Since no
other justification for the bill
makes sense, one can’t help sus-
pecting that this is its real goal.
Karen Selick is the litigation
director for the Canadian Consti-
tution Foundation.
We want to hear from you!
E-mail us at: tlw@lexisnexis.ca ;
“Anglophones fear,
with some
justification, that the
sought-after linguistic
skills will come
bundled with a
particular ideology.
What degree of linguistic
competency would satisfy critics like Grammond? If the
court’s current highly skilled
translators—people who have
made legal translating their
life’s work—nevertheless make
mistakes, isn’t it likely that a
judge who had learned a second
language merely for casual use
will make even more mistakes?
Might we not end up with more
misunderstandings, rather than
fewer, by substituting a legal
scholar’s hobby French for a
language scholar’s professional
French?
Or must we select only judges
with a Pierre Trudeau-like mastery of both languages? This
would reduce the pool of candidates even further. And we can’t
keep ignoring the elephant in
the room: the pool would be
heavily skewed towards candidates from francophone backgrounds, since a much higher
percentage of francophones
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