Revisiting theArthurs ReportTwenty Years Later

Abstract

Harry Arthurs'Law & Learningreport, conceived by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and carried to fruition in 1983 by a ten-person Consultative Group and a twenty-three person Advisory Panel, was a formative document in the history of Canadian legal education. My recollection of the release of the report is probably intensified because of the circumstances in which I experienced it the following year - a seminar room filled with cranky faculty members at the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario, as stony terrain as any venue one might have imagined for the reception of such a report. I was then a relatively junior untenured professor, hoping to build a scholarly record in the field of feminist legal history, who had unwittingly found myself in a law school in which most faculty were devoted to building its reputation as a professionally conservative, black letter law institution. Into such a milieu strode my former professor and mentor, Harry Arthurs, whose habit of describing Osgoode Hall Law School as the “best law school in the Commonwealth” had not particularly endeared him to the Western professoriate previously. I felt like a deer in the headlights, and my sense was that Harry Arthurs himself was very ill at ease in a room that exuded defensiveness and hostility, as well as both latent and overt anger.