When she was 4 years old and declared to the world she was going to be a lawyer, Rosalie Silberman Abella was thinking of her Jewish refugee father and not a future seat on the Supreme Court of Canada where she would contribute to key decisions on human rights.
Her father had gone to law school in Poland but couldn’t practice in his new home of Ontario because he was not a citizen, Abella said at Northeastern University during the delivery of the Morton E. Ruderman Memorial Lecture: Headwinds to Justice.
“It’s one of my earliest memories. I had this childlike sense of outrage that my father wasn’t allowed to be what he wanted to be,” she said.
At bar mitzvahs and weddings, people would say her goal was adorable then add, “‘No, really. What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Because girls weren’t lawyers,” said Abella, who was born in 1946 in Stuttgart, Germany, in a displaced persons camp.
Not only did she graduate from law school, finishing one month after her father died, she became the first refugee appointed to the bench in Canada and the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
And what a legal career it was — so storied that she is the subject of a recent PBS documentary highlighting her career of advocating for the rights of women, people with disabilities, aboriginal people and members of visible minorities called “Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella.”
Coining such key legal concepts such as “employment equity” while heading a royal commission now known simply as the “Abella commission,” she was a member of the Supreme Court of Canada for 17 years.
Forbes magazine says as a Canadian Supreme Court justice, Abella played a key role in many decisions, “including legalizing same-sex marriage, establishing a right to assisted suicide, protecting collective bargaining rights, and ensuring other refugees to Canada were treated with kindness and dignity.”
“I said equality is acknowledging and accommodating differences so people can be treated as equals,” Abella said. “And I said discrimination means arbitrarily depriving someone of mainstream access based on their identity.”
“Rolling rights back, depriving people of rights, is antithetical to what constitutions are for, what judges are for,” she said during the Ruderman lecture, which took place March 27 at ISEC as a question-and-answer session with Simon Rabinovitch, Stotsky Associate Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies.
Rabinovitch said it was apparent from the PBS documentary that Abella’s sense of fairness and rage at injustice was shaped by both her experiences as a trailblazing female jurist, and as a refugee and the child of Holocaust survivors.
“The backstory is my parents are Polish,” Abella said. “They got married in 1939 on September the third, the day the war started. They had a son, Julius.”
The little boy would have been her older brother, but he was murdered at 2 years old by Nazis at Treblinka following a roundup of family members.
Her parents, Jacob and Fanny Silbermen, survived internments in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp and Buchenwald Concentration Camp, respectively.
“I grew up hearing these stories,” Abella said.
Her parents “somehow were really, despite all of this, quite happy. They talked to me all the time. I had nothing but questions, everything from as silly as, ‘How did you wash your hair in the concentration camp’ to ‘How did you feel when you found out that your son was gone?’”
Abella’s compassionate curiosity extended throughout her legal career, including her first judgeship as a family court judge who traveled across Canada.
“What did I learn as a judge? This is not about me. This is not top-down. Everything I did was about being open-minded. I have views,” Abella said. “It is about listening and confronting your predilections and your predispositions and deciding fairly.”
“The longer I judged, the less judgmental I became,” she said.
Abella said she did not fear controversy because whatever happened to her couldn’t be worse than what happened to her family in Europe.
But she said she is troubled by increasingly intolerant attitudes that there is only one right answer to a question or issue.
“It is the requirement of ideological compliance that is terrifying in a country (the U.S.) that has had so many intellectuals, so much cultural vibrancy from the diversity of views,” Abella said.
For instance, she said that while she’s not comfortable with some aspects of diversity, equity and inclusion, the remedy is arguing about the mechanics and methodology “not obliteration.”
Rabinovitch asked Abella how Americans can follow in her footsteps and uphold the rule of law and fight for justice in society.
Abella said she feels “a little bit restrained in giving you advice,” because as a judge in Canada she was not at risk of losing her position due to controversial or unpopular decisions.
“I thought judges who didn’t protect to the utmost the rights of people who came to us for protection weren’t doing their job,” she said.
“But I never for a moment thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to support my family,’ or ‘We’re going to get kicked out of the country,’ or there’s going to be somebody to scoop me up, to take me back to where I came from,” Abella said.
“It has to be collaborative. It has to be all the universities. It has to be all the law firms. It has to be all the institutions,” she said. “It’s not fair to be the only university sticking your neck out.”