The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 |Episode 7 | Sonia Lawrence
Dive into the fascinating world where feminism meets constitutional law! Sonia Lawrence, who directs the Graduate Program and the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School, shares her journey into feminism. She delves into her research on the critical analysis of equality and how it intersects with race and gender. Sonia's insights are both profound and relatable, especially when she discusses the challenges of balancing doctrinal scholarship with feminist perspectives.
First published 2017.
The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.
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The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 |Episode 7 | Sonia Lawrence
Kate Sear: [00:00:00] Good morning. My name's Kate Sear joined today by my colleague,
Becky Batagol: Becky Batagol. Hello.
Kate Sear: So welcome to The Scarlet Letter, which is the podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today, Becky and I are joined by Professor Sonia Lawrence from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, in Canada.
At Osgoode, Sonia is Director of the Graduate Program and Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies. Welcome, Sonia. Thank you for joining us.
Sonia Lawrence: Thanks for inviting me.
Becky Batagol: Sonia joined Osgoode's faculty in 2001. She graduated from the University of Toronto's joint LLB, a Masters of Social Work program and went on to serve as a law clerk to Chief Justice Beverly McLachlan for the Supreme Court of Canada.[00:01:00]
She then pursued graduate work at Yale Law School. Her work centers on the critical analysis of the legal conception of equality. She teaches constitutional law and equality related courses and seminars. So Sonia, perhaps you'd like to start by telling us, what does feminism mean to you?
Sonia Lawrence: So I, I was worried that you were really going to ask me this question.
It's a difficult one. It's not as easy as you'd think it'd be, but essentially I think my, Feminism that I bring to my scholarship, I think, is a feminism that's been really informed by Critical and critical racism. approaches to thinking about women's equality. I'm not, I'm, I don't think that I have really an orientation that works with the waves because I feel like the waves are a little bit more of the movement side, whereas these other descriptions are a little bit more on the scholarly side, but fundamentally I would say that
Becky Batagol: You mean the waves of feminism?
The waves of feminism, the waves of feminism. I'm visualizing a beach.
Sonia Lawrence: Yeah, it's probably not a beach. [00:02:00] But, But yeah, so I think that in that sense I'm interested in questions of distribution and justice and equality in that light, rather than necessarily in the idea that women are equal to men.
And I'm very interested in issues of of race and gender together and that I think is in part, I mean you guys have been in Toronto for a few days now, I think that's in part because of the place and time that I'm, came to my feminism. So it's a settler colonial country like Australia, it's a city made up of enormous numbers of people from all over the world coming in different waves now, different waves of immigration and so it's a feminism that I want.
I wanted to explain what I see. And so that's another piece of what it is that I'm looking for.
Kate Sear: And Sonia, you talked before about your some of the concerns that you have growing up in a place that's, has a colonial settler history. [00:03:00] And this is a difficult question, but is there a point in time in your memory or your consciousness where you started to identify as a feminist or identify feminist concerns that then fed into your work?
Sonia Lawrence: Actually, no, I don't remember a point in time. I remember some things that make me think certain parts of my feminism, I think, were just the way that I was raised. And, but these were not movement feminism pieces. They were, I think a lot more just how did my parents speak to us about what we would do, about whose responsibility was whose, how did my mother understand how she wanted to talk to me about being a girl, all of those things.
And, there's so much of that is wrapped up in my own family's immigration history and my mother's both of my parents, my dad doesn't have a university degree and my mom does. Yes. And so thinking about what is [00:04:00] education, how do you use education, what are you going to do in the future? And, there's a whole variety of different moments that I can pick out of my childhood thinking no, I already knew that then.
And these were not. sophisticated understandings. They were just things that were part of the framework. So I wasn't consciously labelling that feminism. Until I think quite a bit later, probably high school. Yeah. You're just looking for some teachers to bring that into the classroom for you.
And I remember being in a history class and wanting to do an assignment of tabulating how many women were in the history. Textbook and having a teacher who was like, that's not interesting and not even a thing. And no, you can't do that for grades and thinking. When you start to think that guy's an idiot, instead of I'm wrong.
. You start to think, okay, maybe that more conscious moment. Yes. And went looking for other writing about Canadian women's history. Maybe that's a better place to
Becky Batagol: And did you study gender at university?
Sonia Lawrence: No.
I [00:05:00] have a sociology and history. My four year BA was in sociology and history.
I think I might have
Becky Batagol: said social work before, sorry. No,
Sonia Lawrence: but I do have that. Ah okay. No, it was sociology and history. Yeah, there was a ton of gender and race stuff there. A ton of post colonial history. But this was in the This is my degree is a 95 degree so it was whatever was then counted as those things.
But then, yeah, my law degree is, the U of T Law School has a joint law and social work degree, so instead of three years for law school, it's four. You start one year in law school, one year in social work, and two years that are mostly law school and a little bit of social work.
So that was also a place to do that, to do more thinking about power and power of relations and the structural organization of our society in the social work school, whereas at the law school there was there were deep small pockets of feminism.
Yes. As opposed to any kind of overlay.
Becky Batagol: And your work today focuses on [00:06:00] constitutional law, on judging, on equality and gender, and also Aboriginal rights. How did you become interested in these areas?
Sonia Lawrence: Sometimes I think it's just because I didn't come out of the honeymoon period of discovering that there were rights and moving on to more interesting things.
One of the things was when you are interested in kind of a broad understanding of social justice, you start to look around in law school, and especially in first year law school, you're not necessarily getting an idea of where that could come from other than when people start talking about what's consciously labeled rights and equality.
And I think I got stuck in that mode, which is not to say that I don't find it important or a useful analysis or an important way of understanding, especially at the national level, what our national discourse is about these things. But truthfully, what I actually wanted to be able to do was be able to analyze things that were in the paper.
Things that you would see happening and I wanted to be able to have better tools to understand that. And that's [00:07:00] pretty much the opposite of case method constitutional law, right? Where you're talking about super high level, very divorced. from people's daily lives. So I try to bounce back and forth a little bit in my scholarship and in my teaching, which is a real challenge especially with constitutional law.
Like the danger of deifying judges and reifying the things that they do and treating abstractions as though they're real is really profound. But social work, you is almost the opposite, like the downside of certain forms of social work that don't take structural analysis into account is the opposite of that.
You're deep in people's like emotional well all the time and you never come out of that to do something else,
Kate Sear: Yeah, it's really interesting too how those two disciplines have obviously shaped your thinking, having learned, studied them both together.
Sonia Lawrence: I think that it was what saved me in law school because I had already spent a year in social work when I went to law school and in social work they spent a lot of time on understanding who you were in [00:08:00] the situation and how that would affect the situation.
And even as I say that, you say, Oh, that is the opposite of law school, right? You're not part of the situation, and you should take yourself out of the situation. Initial, first year, traditional, big course teaching does that. So if you're putting yourself into it, you're probably doing it wrong. And so bouncing back and forth between one place where people were a little bit too, I feel you, I understand your feelings.
And another phase where people were a little bit too, feelings have nothing to do with this. Stop bringing in extraneous things that don't matter. Everything that matters is here in the text, work with that. Actually was quite helpful. Yes. In terms of making you just live between those, both of those disciplines in ways that just enabled a lot of critique.
And it's a very small program. Not a lot of people do it. There's a very big law and MBA program. And a very small law and social work program. But, the social work faculty was most of the people went to do individual therapy. [00:09:00] And I had thought that I was going to write policy. That was what I thought.
Why go to law school? At that time, law school was not ruinously expensive. And I didn't want to be a lawyer. I just really wanted to be able to talk in a way that would force people to take me seriously. So I thought this was the tool that I needed. And I did. But things just didn't work out that way.
I I suppose everybody says that when they're just describing their career path. But things didn't work out that way.
Kate Sear: So it sounds very much like a lot of what you're interested in, or what sort of has shaped your thinking is trying to disrupt binary thinking about emotions and the like. But, which of course is very closely linked to feminism.
But can you tell us a little bit more about how, in other ways, your research links to feminist ideas?
Sonia Lawrence: I actually get asked that a lot because I, because, I think because I'm often writing about things that aren't necessarily explicitly feminist. So for instance, and sometimes that's just the classic law stuff, like I'm interested in equality analysis under the Charter regardless of the ground because it plays out in so [00:10:00] many different contexts.
So it might be disability or age, but it's related in some way to Unequal distributions of power and privilege and those kinds of things. So some of it's that, but I think The establishment of kind of a a body of Canadian feminist scholarship was already there when I came into the academy.
So I was never the only feminist there. And so a lot of it was actually thinking, what would I want to be added to this? Or how do I see this actually as part of a problem? What is it I want to say back to some of this work that has many, has a lot in common with where I'm coming from, but I also see That needs to do more.
I think it should do more. I think a real broader understanding of what women's equality might want would include more consideration of women in different parts of the social socioeconomic status, women at the bottom of that, immigrant women, racialized women, not always the same group, right?
Like those, all [00:11:00] of those things, and looking for ways to bring that into the the work and maybe particularly of legal feminism as it was operating in the charter context which was test case litigation and kind of, so what test cases are being brought and what do we think is being won that we're claiming as feminist victory or feminist loss?
How do we understand those things?
Becky Batagol: So in Australia, constitutional law as a discipline has been dominated by. older white men. Is that true here? Yeah. So what does it feel like to be a female academic here interested in gender working in constitutional law?
Sonia Lawrence: I think one of the things that meant is that I did a lot of doctrinal scholarship at the beginning of my career because I wanted to prove that I could do these things.
Also it meant that I followed a particular career path that absolutely tracked that Absolutely track the career paths of white male academics who [00:12:00] were already in the academy. And that the only time I ever even thought that a career as a law professor would be open to me is basically on the basis of grades in law school.
And people coming to me and saying, oh, this is possible. And then saying, and this is how you do it. And then I just did it. Because actually at that time it was not at all clear to me that there was another way to do it. Law school had just gotten embroiled in a threatened lawsuit from a woman of colour who was passed over for a position.
They were, my law school was in the national paper saying, there aren't any qualified candidates, that sort of thing. So it didn't really feel like it was a field that was open. I'm by no means the first woman of colour law professor in Canada, not at all. But it just didn't, it didn't really feel like a thing that would be possible.
So I think I did a lot of doctrinal scholarship as a way of illustrating that I can do that. If that's what you [00:13:00] want me to do. But I also would prefer to do this. So the first work that I actually published was a piece about something I saw in the paper and then wanted to play out and think about that was a extremely low level court case that was only reported as in the newspaper as opposed to any other way at that time.
And I wanted, I knew that I wanted to do the one, but I didn't dislike the other, and it was an easy road, right? I'm not one of those feminist academics who thought I'm going to battle the whole way through this.
Kate Sear: Can I ask you, Sonia, that pressure and expectation that you felt to produce a particular kind of academic scholarship in order to be legitimate, or to be perceived as legitimate by other people, do you think that's still a thing?
Now, or do you feel that with, a function of time a little bit, things are changing?
Sonia Lawrence: For my junior colleagues I think it is changing, and actually, weirdly, I suspect that some of that scholarship was probably, even [00:14:00] at the time, seen as really quite dull, and why is she doing that?
Maybe that's all she can do? Strangely, from another part of the academy. I think it is changing, one of the things is I only have an LLM, I don't have a PhD. Very shortly after I got hired in 2001, it was already becoming very clear that it would be very difficult to get hired with only an LLM.
Yeah, I do think it's changing. I have lots of junior colleagues who do both with balance. So that in, they do both much more work that we might almost call law and society type work, but they do it with a level of doctrinal knowledge that's different from what law and society, many law and society scholars bring or care to bring to their scholarship.
And they do it with an eye towards teaching Law students who are in their second degree, right? So this is a different thing for us. So many of them have a degree already that might be in some kind of social science and they're coming to law school after that. So I think it also operates a little bit with the student body.
That they might be [00:15:00] open to trying to combine those two, like a doctrinal analysis on top of an analysis that you already have. But in a scholarly sense, not in your experiential sense.
Becky Batagol: And in your work in constitutional law, you've written about the connection between diversity in the judiciary, so on the bench amongst judges, and also the concept, the constitutional concept of judicial independence.
Sonia Lawrence: Yeah.
Becky Batagol: What is that connection?
Sonia Lawrence: For a long time in Canada we've had questions about the incredible whiteness of our judiciary. Thank you. And questions about what does diversity on the bench actually require? And so for many years feminists have been and it's put a lot of attention on the incredible maleness of the judiciary.
And so there was a significant and interesting early writing about why do we need women on the bench, what is the difference that women on the bench is going to make, that kind of thing. And such that by the time I graduated law school, the Chief [00:16:00] Justice was a woman. There, I, there were three women on the Supreme Court of Canada.
It's not nine, but it's three out of nine. The questions about the ease with which an understanding of women in a binary, like there are men and there are women and so that we're going to try to just get some women onto it, like it falls apart when you start thinking about other forms of diversity.
So whether or not you reject the kind of idea that we can actually talk about sex and gender that way, when you start to try to put in things like disability even religious background, family background race, ethnicity, all of these things it, it gets much, much more complicated. And so I was trying to develop, but what I was really trying to do was develop an idea about What leads us to conclude that judicial independence exists, right?
So there's two basic kinds. There's judicial independence for an individual judge, and then there's a structural form of judicial independence. And I was trying to draw out the argument that if you live in a society that's [00:17:00] deeply marked by racialized people you're Racial injustice an incredibly white bench is actually quite possibly a structural independence problem and that if we understood it that way it might be a way of explaining to people why this is not just about flat representation and kind of it's time for us to get ours or something like that, but actually to talk about what it means to think about the judiciary as a whole.
And the legitimacy of the law that they're doling out, given the population they're doling it out to. And so I was trying to play with the, think about, how do you make the argument that it's not just a thin representational issue, but that there's something quite pro significant, constitutionally significant, but also theoretically significant about who the judiciary is that's doing the work.
And structural independence seemed to be able to carry some of that?
Becky Batagol: I've never seen in [00:18:00] Australia anyone make that connection between judicial independence, which is also a fundamental constitutional doctrine in Australia, and diversity. And I was, Australia, we have never had an Asian judge in any of our superior courts.
In 2018. It's amazing.
Sonia Lawrence: This is one of the ways that the, that it actually is so complicated and found it so much. It's so much more interesting when I try to go into it because when you start to think about, so what would that then require so for instance, how would we break down categories of race or ethnicity or immigration status and what would be sufficient to solve this problem of judicial independence?
And there's some great work by folks like Les Moran about the categories that are salient. in thinking about this in a given country are unique to that country's own history. So that in Canada, one of the things that we've seen is a quite a early calls for the appointment of an [00:19:00] Indigenous judge to the Supreme Court of Canada.
So when I say early, a decade ago, which is very late in other terms, but not contemporary. And they've continued to the contemporary time because we haven't done it yet. But I think that that's one way of thinking about what are the things that would be salient in your own context.
But then even to think, so growing up in a city like Toronto, you think, okay, there's, if there isn't an Asian judge, So if we have an Asian judge, then, but if that Asian judge is Korean, do we then need to think about when are we going to have a Filipino judge, and when are we going to have a, and how do you determine how to break down those categories, how to measure them, like those are all significant.
Quite profoundly political questions, but to the extent that judgeships in in Canada, especially on the federal bench, have actually also been a form of political patronage. They're a tool of political patronage. And there is a concern that some of the ways that diversity on the bench gets interpreted within communities of color is, it's our turn.
And those communities of color are not [00:20:00] pan people of color. They're different communities and I've actually found that to be also a very tricky conversation to have. This can't be a conversation about when is it our turn. It has to be something else, and like Merit actually can't do that work either.
Because there, there are just so many mediocre judges, that we can't pretend that, if we expand the concept of Merit, maybe we could get there to a more diverse bench. But the truth is, I don't think, I don't think that's going to do the work for us. I don't think that that's, I think that merit tends to be much more of a cover.
And I think, we spent a long time trying to say let's expand the categories of what is meritorious then. Let's do that work. And now I think I just want to shout at people like, I just want you to appoint mediocre women of color. I just want you to appoint mediocre women. I just want you to appoint mediocre people who are not, older white men and see what happens.
But of course the truth is that what happens is that those people are put in really very [00:21:00] difficult positions. And so that's the flip side of it, right? Is that in a society that's deeply marked by racial injustice, if and by gender injustice, when you put women and people of color and women of color on the bench, what are you asking them to do?
And the idea that they can be transformational in those spaces is a really complicated one. Especially when you're not talking about the Supreme Court, which, let's face it, we're usually not. We're talking about very busy, overworked courts, either dispensing family law justice or criminal justice.
The scope for Any kind of significant change role for those people other than legitimating the system that they're working in is really complicated.
Kate Sear: Yeah, and it's interesting too because it ties in really closely to this debate that's happening in Australia at the moment about female representation on corporate boards and merit.
There's a vibrant debate happening in Australia at the moment. And of course, we often hear people [00:22:00] say we. We had a woman once on our board, we tried that and it didn't work out. We'll move on. So it really resonates actually in other settings and back home.
But so we mentioned at the top of the podcast that you're the director of the Institute of Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall. Can you tell us a little bit about what the Institute does and what does it mean to describe a research organization as a feminist organization?
Sonia Lawrence: Can I tell you the history of the, because it's actually interesting.
Unlike many university research centers, this one didn't start because someone had an idea to start it. It started because of a human rights claim that was brought when a woman was passed over for dean at the law school. And there was a campaign around at the time, people had buttons that said, Dare to Dream of a Feminist Dean.
She was passed over. And this is fairly recent history, so still not the easiest thing to have a conversation about and so So, what happened was that a group of other [00:23:00] women feminist law professors brought a claim under Canada's human rights system, so it's not lawsuits it's a human rights case, and they they won, and what they requested was a structural remedy, right?
So the structural remedy was, you, the law school has to have an equality guarantee in their official documentation, and they have to put money in to endow a center, an institute for feminist legal studies that will be endowed. And that will serve to foster a community for feminist scholarship, for feminist students, for feminists, and for the feminist community outside the law school.
So that is an incredibly freeing kind of starting point. Because what it means is you're not subject to different kinds of university not so much oversight, because of course there's financial oversight, but the ongoing need to maintain grants and that kind of thing. Community of interest is the phrase that I'm working with.
I haven't been the director of, I don't [00:24:00] know, but anyway, obviously there were many directors of the institute before I came along. And for a long time, people would say, I'm going to call up and say, I'd like to visit the institute. The institute was a filing cabinet. There's no, of course there's no institute, but because everything is a filing cabinet.
But anyway, we got a new building and now we actually do have some physical space. So there's the physical space as well. So then within that, what do we do? So unlike the other kinds of university centers, so we don't actually run grants. It's through the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, rather, we try to do the work of making space for feminist law students, of bringing, making sure that we have speakers that come in that do feminist work, of maintaining the blog in Canada, of connecting with other feminist legal academics, of making a home for the faculty who are building relations with feminist organizations in the community.
And of that kind of [00:25:00] community of interest work. And there, in the past, there have been different modes of doing this. So the institute under Brenda Cosman, who is director, produced a really great book that I think still resonates for me that's called, I think it's called Feminists Confront the Market.
It's a really interesting book by a whole variety of my colleagues, most of whom don't study equality law, which is a really great thing when When women do not study equality law but have backgrounds in feminism and want to work feminism into their IP scholarship or they want to work feminism into their scholarship about corporate boards, for instance or public regulation of any number of different things, whether it's private law or public law.
So that's the work of the institute. And then we welcome visitors and we try to support Student feminist organizing as well, which can be complicated, but which is always a really fun job.
Kate Sear: And can I just ask you, Sonia, one other thing is given that it was a kind of condition of [00:26:00] that decision, that charter decision that you mentioned, that the human rights decision that there'd be this endowment, isn't an endowment for a fixed period of time or in perpetuity?
Does the Institute have a future, yeah
Sonia Lawrence: can't claim to be a balance sheet expert, but my understanding is that it's not a huge amount of money, but there's a solid chunk of money that comes in to help us pay for speakers that come in and to help us pay for events, to help us have the events where we're actually offering food or something like that.
Yeah, and I think it's as soon as you said perpetuities, I realized I can't remember anything about wills and estates or trusts, so I don't want to say that it's a perpetuity, but I think Yeah, it's ongoing.
Becky Batagol: How exciting.
Sonia Lawrence: It's quite, that is actually a really unique thing, like nobody I've ever talked to before has said, oh yeah, I've heard of that before, right?
Because there's endowed centers, but not as a structural remedy for actual sexist happening in your university, that what you get [00:27:00] is support, not for that happening, but much more broadly to engage with questions of feminist scholarship in law.
Becky Batagol: It's very exciting, from an activist past to an activist future.
Thank you Sonia, thank you very much for your time today. Kate and I have been here in Toronto chatting with Sonia and other members of the Institute of Feminist Legal Studies about connections with our own Feminist Legal Studies group at Monash. So it's been wonderful, the connection's been amazing.
So thank you Sonia, thank you Kate, thank you all for listening to The Scarlet Letter. thanks.