Courthouse Cancellations and Challenges to Self-Regulation: Correspondent's Report from Canada

Abstract

The challenges to the self-regulation of lawyers that have occurred in many jurisdictions around the world have so far escaped Canadian lawyers. This has not been for lack of scandal; rather, as Allan Hutchinson wrote over a decade ago, it has been due in part to lack of a single defining scandal like Watergate in the United States or the crisis of consumer complaints in England and Wales. However, the Canadian legal profession has not been without scandals of its own. Given the thinness of support for self-regulation outside of the legal profession and the lack of political clout of lawyers, Canadian lawyers should be concerned that they may be one scandal away from the loss of self-regulation. Two seemingly unconnected events provide some insight into the Canadian predicament.