Louis LeBel

Louis LeBel

Introduction to Louis LeBel

Louis LeBel, born in 1939, Canadian jurist and puisne (associate) justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (2000- ). LeBel was born in Québec City. He received a law degree in 1961 from Université Laval in Sainte-Foy, Québec. After being called to the bar in 1962, he earned a master's degree in law at the University of Toronto in 1963 and a graduate degree in private law at Université Laval in 1965. He practiced law in Québec City from 1962 until 1984, when he was appointed to the Québec Court of Appeal. He is the coauthor of Le droit du travail en vigueur au Québec (Current Labor Law in Québec, 1971), a major book on its subject. In January 2000 Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed LeBel to the Supreme Court of Canada.

LeBel's best-known and most controversial decision on the Québec Court of Appeal was Tremblay v. Daigle (1989), in which a man sought a court injunction to prevent his former girlfriend from getting an abortion. LeBel's decision for a divided court upheld the injunction granted by the trial judge, on the grounds that the fetus was a human being under the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. This decision threatened to reopen the judicial issue of abortion, which the Supreme Court of Canada had ruled on in the R. v. Morgentaler decision in 1988. In that decision, the Supreme Court found that the federal law banning abortion was unconstitutional and that a woman has the right to an abortion.

Two weeks after LeBel issued his decision, a unanimous Supreme Court overturned it, flatly rejecting both the suggestion that the fetus is a person and the idea that the father has rights in the abortion decision. After his appointment to the Supreme Court, LeBel explicitly denied any interest in revisiting the issue of abortion. LeBel will reach the Court's mandatory retirement age of 75 in November 2014.” (1)

Resources

Notes and References

Information about Louis LeBel in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia

Guide to Louis LeBel

Law is our Passion

This entry about Louis LeBel has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0) licence, which permits unrestricted use and reproduction, provided the author or authors of the Louis LeBel entry and the Encyclopedia of Law are in each case credited as the source of the Louis LeBel entry. Please note this CC BY licence applies to some textual content of Louis LeBel, and that some images and other textual or non-textual elements may be covered by special copyright arrangements. For guidance on citing Louis LeBel (giving attribution as required by the CC BY licence), please see below our recommendation of "Cite this Entry".

• APA
• MLA
• MLA 7
• CHICAGO
• OSCOLA

Usage Metrics

156 Views

Google Scholar: Search for Louis LeBel Related Content

 

Schema Summary

This entry was last updated: August 24, 2014