Random and Related Thoughts: “Outsiders” – What the Law tells Women, Indigenous and Racialized People

December 29, 2020

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girl is confused, family law can help “Outsiders”: What the Law tells Women, Indigenous and Racialized People

Thought #1

I did not start out wanting to go to law school.

I did not think I would be a lawyer.

My late teens and twenties and early thirties were spent doing front-line, community, not-for-profit, activist work. Most of this work related to violence against women and children; much of it overlapped with advocacy on issues of race, class and sexuality.

When I worked at the Rape Crisis Centre much of my time was spent in rallies and protests on the front of the courthouse steps, calling attention to court decisions that ignored the reality of sexual assault survivors and decisions that, we believed, produced unjust results.

While at the Rape Crisis Centre I liaised with “institutions” – the police, medical, and court institutions. I was on the outside, working with people on the inside of such institutions trying to educate and seek reforms from systems that seemed out of touch with the lived experiences of women who faced violence or with the impact of racism and/or poverty on communities of colour and working class and poor people.

Now as a lawyer, I’m on the “inside” of the legal system…an officer of the court. I am in the institution of law; I see the protesters outside on the courthouse steps. I am “inside” but I am still an “outsider.”

Many women of colour and Indigenous lawyers write about this experience; it starts as early as law school.
Dr. Patricia Monture, Mohawk from the Six Nations Grand River Territory, an Indigenous legal scholar, activist, and professor, wrote in Thunder in my Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks:

“…I felt during my law student days that I was always waiting for my legal education to begin. I always felt that “something” was missing or perhaps that I was missing something…if I could only change, perhaps fit in a little better, my law school experience would be rewarding. Both the institution and some of my teachers reinforced this belief. Since then I have understood that the greatest obstacle was not myself, but the very structure of the institution and the legal studies program. …The feeling that “something” is missing is knowing that you are an outsider.” (page 97)

I survived law school by reading this book again, and again.

Thought #2

Women continue to leave the law at high rates.

Racialized women and Indigenous lawyers in particular face greater barriers in the practice of law.

In the CBA National Magazine Summer 2018 Issue Volume 27 No. 2, there is an article entitled “Why Women Leave” by Janice Tibbetts. Here are some interesting points:

The Law Society of Upper Canada “put the departure rate for women at 52 per cent compared with 35 per cent for men. Some returned, but they were most likely to be men.”
In a 2016 study of Criminal Lawyers Association, “By 2014, 60 per cent of women who had started out in the business in 1998 had bowed out, compared with 47 per cent of men.”
The CBA has been studying women in the legal profession for 25 years and “little has changed.” The CBA’s “first national examination of women in the legal profession” in 1993 concluded that: “law firms were not ‘environmentally friendly’ for women and must lose their ‘maleness’ by overhauling a business model that was long ago built by men for men.”
“It is well established that the road to equality is even steeper for racialized lawyers, particularly racialized women.”
See the great essay “Black on Bay Street” by Hadiya Roderique featured in the Globe and Mail who writes about the experience of leaving a Bay Street private law firm from her experience as a racialized woman lawyer.

Thought #3

We learn things from the Court about race, about violence against women and about Indigenous communities. The law tells us a lot. Sometimes what the public anticipates or hopes “should” happen in legal cases, does not happen.