Abstract
Quiet Rebels is a “group biography” of the 187 women who were called to the Ontario bar between 1897 and 1957, detailing their experiences as just a tiny number of women students and often the “only woman lawyer” in many Ontario communities. Most of these women lawyers were Protestant, white and middle class, although the stories of a few “Others” have special significance. In these six decades, the Law Society of Upper Canada provided the only accredited legal education for admission to the bar, including articles in law firms and a few daily lectures (mainly by practitioners) at Osgoode Hall. The book also focuses on significant changes after 1957: the accreditation of university law schools in Ontario; the “surge in numbers” of women in law in the context of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s and more recently; new (and sometimes exclusionary) developments in the practice of law in recent decades; and the experiences of more numerous women lawyers who are not Protestant, white or middle class. Overall, the individual biographies of these women lawyers provide “little stories” that reveal an important “bigger story” about gendered patterns of exclusion and discrimination in the legal profession, and how some women lawyers responded to these challenges.
Based on Professor Koh’s forthcoming book, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century
“Few people understand the complex workings of our National Security Constitution better than Harold Hongju Koh, and no one analyzes and explains them better. In this outstanding scholarly achievement, Professor Koh describes the growing dysfunction caused by institutional failures in all three branches of our federal government, and recommends a badly needed, workable strategy for constitutional repair.” — Chris Coons, U.S. senator from Delaware.
Professor Koh is one of the country’s leading experts in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He first began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and served as its fifteenth Dean from 2004 until 2009. Over five decades, he has served four Presidents. From 2009 to 2013, he took leave as the Martin R. Flug ’55 Professor of International Law to join the State
Department as its 22nd Legal Adviser, service for which he received the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, and returned to that office as Senior Advisor in the first year of the Biden Administration. From 1993 to 2009, he was Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, and
from 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Professor Koh has received eighteen honorary degrees and more than thirty awards for his human rights work. He has published more than 250 articles, testified regularly before Congress, and authored or co-authored nine books, including most recently “The National Security Constitution in the 21st Century ” (Yale 2024).
When the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were adopted in 2011, the expectation was that the responsibility of business to respect human rights would largely be a voluntary one, with improvements in business actions occurring due mainly to social and economic pressures. While some businesses have made changes, and some industry associations have encouraged this, there has been an increasing amount of legal regulation of business for their actions which have had adverse human rights impacts.
This regulation has occurred at the international, regional and domestic levels, with changes to the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, the International Labour Organisation Tripartite Principles and other international documents, which place expectations on states to act in relation to their regulation of business activities impacting on human rights. In the past few years, a number of states, such as Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom and the United States, have introduced various pieces of legislation or administrative action to place legal obligations on businesses in regard to a range of human rights. The European Union is about to finalise its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive which would cover a wide range of human rights and environmental matters, and would include within its scope both EU domiciled businesses and businesses domiciled elsewhere and operating in the EU. In addition, a series of cases before the courts, including in Canada, have broadened the possible legal duties and liabilities of businesses in this area.