About Bora Laskin

On September 30, 2014, the Faculty of Law at Lakehead University was renamed the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law. 

Read the full announcement here.

As Dean Stuesser wrote in the Fall 2014 Newsletter: "We are indeed privileged to name the Faculty of Law after one of Canada's greatest legal minds, Chief Justice Bora Laskin, and grateful to the Laskin family in allowing us to do so. It is fitting that the law school bears the Laskin name. He was born and raised in Thunder Bay and he, like us, forged a new path in legal education in Canada. Students and staff will wear the Bora Laskin name with honour and pride."

Bora Laskin was born and raised in Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay, Ontario) on October 5, 1912 to Russian Jewish immigrants. 

He attended Fort William Collegiate Institute and with exceptional marks, was able to enter directly into second year of the honour law undergraduate program at the University of Toronto, in 1930, at the age of 17.

He graduated with his BA in 1933, an MA (U of T) in 1935, while articling and preparing for entrance to the bar, and his LL.B. from Osgoode Hall in 1936. He then went on to obtain an LL.M. from Havard in 1937.

When Laskin returned to Toronto, he faced the anti-Semitic attitudes of the day and was unable to find a job either teaching or practicing law because of his Jewish heritage. He initially took a job doing summaries of legal cases for the Canadian Abridgment.

Laskin began teaching in the undergraduate program at U of T in 1940, and then joined Osgoode Hall teaching staff in 1945. In 1949, Laskin, together with Caeser Wright and John Willis at U of T, began the transformation from an undergraduate law program into a professional law faculty. The University of Toronto was his intellectual home.

Bora Laskin possessed tremendous energies and intellectual ability. He had an extraordinary grasp of vast areas of law. Despite the fact that he taught at all year levels, he still had energy to publish numerous articles and books, edit law reports, sit on various university committees and frequently acted as placement coordinator for students, having kept in close contact with the practising profession. His recommendations were invariably accepted by law firms.

Bora Laskin was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1965 (first Jewish Justice) and later the Supreme Court of Canada in 1970, becoming Chief Justice in 1973. (He was the youngest member to both appointments.) Laskin was uniquely qualified to lead change within the Court, presiding over it during a time when it evolved to become an important branch of government.

He was a civil libertarian who believe that law, like society, was not static but dynamic and, that the doctrine of "stare decisis" had its limitations in the changing visions of passing years.

It should be noted that Bora Laskin was Chancellor of Lakehead University from 1971 - 1980 and that the Faculty of Education Building at Lakehead University was named after Bora Laskin in 1982.

His brother Saul Laskin was the first mayor of amalgamated Thunder Bay (Port Arthur and Fort William amalgamated in 1977).

It is fitting that Ontario's (Canada's) newest law school should be named after this great Canadian who was born and raised in our community.