Bertha Wilson: Postmodern judge in a postmodern time

Bertha Wilson emigrated from Scotland in 1949. She was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1982 at a propitious moment in Canadian legal history shortly before the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Her enormous body of judgments initiated the current Supreme Court standard of contextual analysis. This authorized intellectual biography draws on interviews conducted in Scotland and Canada with Madame Justice Wilson and with her friends, relatives and colleagues from childhood, the church, law school, practice, the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and two post-judicial projects to trace Wilson's story through many contexts from her birth in 1923 to the present.; The sister of two professional philosophers and the wife of an exceptionally learned Presbyterian minister, Wilson was steeped in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. But long before her immigration Canadian social institutions had been disproportionately shaped by our Scottish heritage. The characteristic contextuality of Canadian legal postmodernisms is informed in part by that Scottish common sense tradition.; Wilson embraced the modernist traditions of judicial neutrality and objectivity but revised them to accommodate the fragmentation and multiplication of legal subjects, facts, texts, adjudicative tribunals and even sovereign entities generated by the complex, multicultural and postmodern society Canada has become. In Wilson's opinion, methodologies condition judgments; there is no bright line between procedural and substantive law. A survey of her judgments, memos and academic writings (many yet unpublished) helps demonstrate the integration of modernist analysis and principled contextuality she considers essential to the process of decision-making.; Law and social consensus continually modify each other. The Charter---a postmodern constitution---was inevitable; it required precisely the kind of contextual interpretation Wilson could offer. But although Wilson has been called "a perfect judge for her time", judging was only one facet of her fascinating life. With warmth and generosity Wilson has shared numerous personal anecdotes which illuminate her multiple public roles and contributions to Canadian society.