Gerard V. La Forest

La Forest Gerard V

Introduction to Gerard V. La Forest

Gérard V. La Forest, born in 1926, Canadian jurist and puisne (associate) justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1985-1997). He was born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. La Forest received a bachelor's degree in law at the University of New Brunswick in 1949. That same year he went to Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a B.A. degree in 1951 and an M.A. degree in 1956. Later, at Yale University in Connecticut, he earned master's and doctorate degrees in law in 1965 and 1966 respectively. He spent 14 years as a law professor, first at the University of New Brunswick and then at the University of Alberta, and eight years as a federal public servant before being appointed to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in 1981. In January 1985 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney named La Forest to the Supreme Court. La Forest was the first French-speaker from outside Québec, as well as one of the most distinguished academics, ever to serve on the Court.

After joining the Court, La Forest was one of the most constant allies of Chief Justice Brian Dickson. The Dickson Court, often unanimously, delivered the first decisions on the rights established by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms after the charter's enactment in 1982. Following Dickson's retirement in 1990, La Forest became the leading voice for the minority side of the Court, frequently advocating a position more restrained in its application of the charter than that of the Court's majority. He believed that judges should defer more often to the laws made by legislatures rather than overturning those laws. He dissented in R. v. Morgentaler (1988), the decision that struck down the federal law that banned most abortions. He dissented again in RJR-Macdonald v. Canada (1994), which overturned federal legislation banning tobacco advertising. La Forest also wrote major decisions such as McKinney v. University of Guelph (1990), which found that mandatory retirement provisions for university professors and librarians did not violate the charter. In 1995 he delivered the decision of a divided Court in Egan v. Canada. This decision found that pension laws that denied spousal allowances to same-sex partners were legal under the charter.

After his retirement from the Court in 1997, La Forest served on the New Brunswick Task Force on Aboriginal Issues and on a federal panel reviewing the national Human Rights Act.” (1)

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This entry was last updated: August 24, 2014