Vol. 19 No. 10 · 22 May 1997
pages 26-30 | 6080 words
Persons Aggrieved
Stephen Sedley on law and public life
There is a fairly obvious sense in which the law conditions or even determines, rather than simply reflects, a society’s shared sense of right and wrong (or – which is not the same thing – acceptable and unacceptable). The clearest instance in this generation has been the equality legislation, which has not simply placed on the statute book a prohibition against discrimination on grounds of race or gender, but has generated a fundamental change in the common sense of what kinds of conduct and language towards one’s fellow citizens are acceptable or right. This is statute law at its best – picking up and consolidating an incipient and fragile change of social mood, giving it legitimacy and backing it with legal redress. We have certainly not eliminated racial and sexual discrimination, but few would dispute that things would be markedly worse without the legislation.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 14 · 17 July 1997
From Ron Haggart
The LRB’s rather charming vagueness about distant places is evident in Stephen Sedley’s article (LRB, 22 May) in which he tells us that in 1929 ‘the Privy Council, on an appeal from Canada concerned with the election of the country’s first female senator, managed to get the common law off the hook’ by establishing that a female is indeed a legal ‘person’. Canadian senators, then and now, are not elected, they are appointed. The Privy Council case did involve the Canadian Senate, but not the first woman to be appointed there (Cairine Wilson in 1930). The petitioner to the Privy Council (supported by, among others, the Province of Alberta) was Emily Murphy, who in 1916 became the first woman in the British Empire to be elevated to the Bench. (Canada also had the first woman cabinet minister in the Empire, and the second.) But Emily Murphy, in whose cause the ‘Persons’ case was fought in London, never did make it to the Canadian Senate, perhaps because she was an advocate of eugenics. The eugenics movement had many followers in Britain and the United States but it was in Alberta, under Murphy’s determined leadership, that a Sexual Sterilisation Bill actually became law, and within a few years almost three thousand Albertans felt its sting. The first damages, of CA$740,000, were paid to a patient in 1996.
Ron Haggart
Toronto
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From Stephen Sedley
Ron Haggart of Toronto (Letters, 17 July) took issue with the statement in my article (LRB, 22 May) that the Canadian ‘persons’ case decided by the Privy Council in 1929 concerned the election of Canada’s first woman senator. It has taken me a little while to check the facts. Even then I would probably not be responding at this distance of time had Haggart not begun his letter with a cruel remark about the ‘charming vagueness about distant places’ of the LRB and its contributors.
I was mistaken in speaking of the election of Canada’s first woman senator. Canadian senators are, as Haggart says, appointed. He is also right to say that the first woman to become a senator was not herself involved in the case. But Haggart is not correct if he is suggesting that the 1929 case was unconnected with her appointment. The case, which had failed before the Canadian Supreme Court, succeeded on appeal to the Privy Council in establishing that ‘qualified persons’ for appointment to the Senate under the British North-America Act 1867 included women. There was not just the one appellant Haggart mentions: there were five. Emily Murphy (the one he mentions) had in 1915 become one of the first women anywhere to be appointed a police magistrate by the British Crown. Another, Louise McKinney, had become in 1917 one of the first two women to be elected to a Canadian provincial legislature. The third of the five, Irene Parlby, had become a Minister without Portfolio in Alberta in 1921. The fourth, Nellie McClung, was elected an MP in Alberta the same year. The fifth appellant, Henrietta Muir Edwards, the only one not to have held public office, was provincial vice-president of the National Council of Women. They brought the appeal not out of personal ambition (though Emily Murphy was regarded as a strong candidate for appointment to the Senate) but as representative citizens seeking to establish the legal eligibility of women. It was their victory before the Privy Council which cleared the way for the appointment not, in the event, of any of the five but of Cairine McKay Wilson. Her appointment by the Governor-General as a senator on 15 February 1930 was precisely what the appellants in the ‘persons’ case had set out to make possible.
Stephen Sedley
London WC1
