Frederick Vaughan – författare

Few people have had a greater impact on the lives of Canadians than the late Supreme Court judge Justice Emmett Hall. At the forefront of several important judgements in the 1960s and 70s – such as Truscott and Calder – Hall is perhaps best known for his role in the adoption of universal health care at the federal level in 1968. Based on extensive interviews with Hall and people who knew him, Frederick Vaughan's Aggressive in Pursuit tells Hall's remarkable story.Born in Quebec in 1898 and raised in Saskatchewan, Hall had a long and distinguished career as a lawyer. In 1957, former law school classmate Prime Minister John Diefenbaker appointed Hall to the Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench, and four years later to the office of Chief Justice of Saskatchewan. In 1963, Diefenbaker elevated Hall to the Supreme Court of Canada, where he took up the task of universal health care and showed himself to be an aggressive defender of native causes.Aggressive in Pursuit traces Hall's career from his earliest days of private practice in Saskatchewan to the end of his career, and death, in 1994. It shows how one prairie lawyer made a difference in the life of Canada.

Viscount Richard Burdon Haldane was a philosopher, lawyer, British MP, and member of the British Cabinet during the First World War. He is best known to Canadians as a judge of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Canada's highest court of appeal until 1949), in which role he was extremely influential in altering the constitutional relations between the federal parliament and the provincial legislatures.Chafing under the British North America Act of 1867, which provided for a strong central government, the provincial governments appealed to the Judicial Committee and were successful in gaining greater provincial legislative autonomy through the constitutional interpretations of the law lords. In Viscount Haldane, Frederick Vaughan concentrates on Haldane's role in these rulings, arguing that his jurisprudence was shaped by his formal study of German philosophy, especially that of G.W.F. Hegel. Vaughan's analysis of Haldane's legal philosophy and its impact on the Canadian constitution concludes that his Hegelian legacy is very much alive in today's Supreme Court of Canada and that it continues to shape the constitution and the lives of Canadians since the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.