Northern Justice: The Memoirs of Mr. Justice William G. Morrow

Edited by W.H. Morrow

One of the first Canadians to champion the legal and cultural cause of the North’s indigenous peoples, William George Morrow, the senior partner in an eminent Edmonton law firm, seized the opportunity to go to the North in 1960 and act as a volunteer defence counsel for $10 a day. Morrow took on the quest for greater justice of behalf of the northern Natives long before this had become part of the national conscience. In these memoirs, he describes his daily struggles first as a lawyer, and later as a judge with the question of how an alien law should be applied to Aboriginal culture.

At the height of his career, Morrow was travelling more than 50,000 kilometres a year over bleak, snow-swept terrain to set up makeshift courtrooms in remote communities. He once had to interview a client in the only room where he could be assured privacy an outhouse. A zealous reformer and a brilliant legal strategist, he fought and won many difficult legal battles with the government. He succeeded in brining about sentencing that took into account the shorter life expectancy of northern peoples, the provision of local penitentiaries enabling prisoners the serve sentences in their own communities, greater tolerance of Native and Inuit cultural values in interpretations of the law, and the creation of juries made up of men and women from the community of the accused.

By the time of he death in 1980, Morrow had not only altered the legal landscape of Canada’s North but had instilled in Canadians a greater sensitivity to Native issues. These memoirs by a pioneer of legal reform tell the story of early legal batted against institutionalized racism.

A joint publication of the Osgoode Society of Canadian Legal History and the Legal Archives Society of Alberta.

Copies of this publication are also available through the Osgoode Society of Canadian Legal History.