Law Society Treasurer: Maclean's Article is "Yellow Journalism"

Maclean’s Magazine has ignited significant controversy in Canada's legal community with its August 6th cover story, Lawyers are Rats: Interview with Philip Slayton.

Slayton, a former Bay Street lawyer, law professor and law school dean is currently promoting his book, Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada's Legal Profession.

Some choice snippets from the Maclean's interview:

Q: You taught law for 13 years, both at McGill and the University of Western Ontario, where you were the dean of law. Is there something about legal training that nudges lawyers toward amorality?

Slayton: Yes, I think so. Law students are taught and lawyers subsequently believe that it is not their job to pass judgment on their clients as people, or to pass judgment on what their clients want to do. Lawyers are enablers. They are there to try to do what their client wants, and are in many cases paid handsomely for it. The whole question of the values behind the rules of the legal system is not on the whole of great interest to law schools or the legal profession. And there's an additional point: lawyers are taught to manipulate the rules in favour of their clients. If you're a manipulator of rules, then you can't respect the rules as such or believe that they incorporate important values....

Q: Have you ever felt embarrassed to tell people you're a lawyer?

Slayton: When people on airplanes ask what I do, I say I'm in auto parts. No one wants to talk about auto parts. But if you tell them you're a lawyer, everybody has a story about how they were screwed by a lawyer, or the terrible thing a lawyer did to Aunt Bessie.

Gavin MacKenzie, Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada, responded to the Maclean’s article by way of a forceful statement distributed to the press and Law Society members.

Alleging a wholesale lack of journalistic investigation by interviewer Kate Fillion and shameless self-promotion by Mr. Slayton, McKenzie pulled no punches:

Maclean's Magazine has decided to fill the yellow journalism void created by the decision of Weekly World News to cease publication. Its cover story this week is titled Lawyers are Rats. The cover features photographs of supposedly representative lawyers with captions that read "I'm dishonest" and "I take bribes". The cover promises an exclusive interview with a "top legal scholar and ex-Bay Street partner" who "expose” the corruption of his profession."

The promised exposé is an interview with an author who is promoting a book that can be found in the True Crime section of your local bookstore. The book features 15 or 20 lawyers and former lawyers who were disciplined for egregious misconduct. Some were also convicted of serious criminal offences. The exposé is in fact enabled by the transparent nature of the discipline process the author condemns.

Maclean's allows these few stories to stand unquestioned as representative of the legal profession, even though the author says in his book what one would hope would be obvious to any fair-minded editor of a national newsmagazine: "Only a few lawyers are dishonest. Most behave honourably, serving their clients, profession and community well. My stories of dishonest lawyers are about a handful of people in a profession that now, in Canada, has over ninety thousand members."

Yet in the Maclean's article the author is dismissive of this obvious response to his unconvincing attempt to extrapolate from the misdeeds of the few: "I know lawyers are going to say, 'Come on, he's talking about 15 or 20 members of a profession that has 90,000.' But in telling these stories I'm trying to extract general ideas."

The general ideas he is trying to extract, the author goes on to say, include "the amoral nature of legal practice". The clear implication from both the Maclean's cover and the interview itself is that the reprehensible conduct of the thieves, conmen and sexual predators featured in the book is somehow typical of the legal profession, that lawyers generally are venal, duplicitous, and fraudulent. The author reinforces this implication in a follow-up interview on Maclean's website, in which he says that though he had nothing to do with the cover, he "quite liked it."…

Mr. Slayton, however, may unwittingly have shown his own true colours in this exchange in the interview:

Q: Did you ever pad your bills?

Slayton: My carefully considered answer is that I was part of the legal culture of the times and I did what it demanded. [emphasis added]

We see.

It was the evil partners that made him do it. Or maybe he was just soooooo stressed out...

Yes, there are occasional bad apples in the legal profession. Some of them apparently write books, too.

We do not wish to imply that Mr. Slayton's every comment is objectionable. He raises important issues, at time eloquently.

His attempt, however, to equate the legal profession as a whole with the anomolies featured in his book is, to say the least, a pretty significant stretch.

And it just ain't so.

Essentially, Slayton reveals himself to be more court jester than legal scholar.

His hyperbole is neither serious nor particularly newsworthy. In taking his bait, MacLean's regrettably crosses the line that has traditionally distinguished genuine journalism from tabloid infotainment.

That is an unfortunate descent for Canada's newsmagazine.

- Garry J. Wise and Annie Noa Kenet, Toronto

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