My Life in the Law

Nicole O’Byrne speaks with Robert J. Sharpe about his book My Life in the Law. My Life in the Law is a rich, personal reflection on Robert J. Sharpe’s long, varied, and influential career as a lawyer, scholar, and judge. After giving an account of his early life and education, Sharpe examines his time as a law student in the late 1960s, an era when great emphasis was put upon formalistic legal doctrine, heavily influenced by English law. As a legal academic in the 1970s up until the 1990s, Sharpe participated in Canadian law’s emergence from the shadow of its narrow past. He then dealt with that evolution from the very different perspective of a judge and a legal history scholar during his twenty-five years on the bench. Throughout the book, Sharpe writes about the people who influenced his trajectory: the exceptional lawyers with whom he practiced, his Oxford University professors, and his University of Toronto colleagues. He describes how these people and his three-year experience working as executive legal officer to Justice Brian Dickson at the Supreme Court of Canada prepared him for his twenty-five-year career as a judge. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this memoir tells the story of a man whose fascination with the law has led to an illustrious, decades-long career of great significance. Robert J. Sharpe is judge of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. He taught at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto from 1976 to 1988 and served under Chief Justice Brian Dickson as Executive Legal Officer at the Supreme Court of Canada from 1988 to 1990. If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.