Daniel Soberman, 80, Founding professor of Queen's University law school, leading authority on corporate and constitutional law
Hoodoo
A wise counsellor, a gifted teacher
Founding professor of Queen's University law school went from humble
roots in Depression-era Toronto to become a leading authority on
corporate and constitutional law
JUDY STOFFMAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 2, 2010
http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20100802.OBSOBERMANATL//TPStory/Obituaries
Daniel Soberman had a profound knowledge of corporate and constitutional
law, but he was also passionate about opera, sailing, photography and
Scottish dancing. He died, aged 80, on July 17 in Kingston of
complications from prostate cancer and heart disease.
From modest circumstances, he became one of Canada's most accomplished
legal educators, a founder of Queen's University law school and an
influence on generations of lawyers now scattered across the country.
Among his former students are a member of the Supreme Court of Canada
(Mr. Justice Thomas Cromwell) and a university president (Peter
MacKinnon, University of Saskatchewan).
In 1964, he co-authored (with J.E. Smyth) The Law and Business
Administration in Canada, which has gone through a dozen editions to
become one of Canada's top-selling university textbooks.
Although his legal specialties of constitutional and corporate law seem
disparate, both "address how people should be organized for
self-governance, whether in a country or a business, and this allowed
Dan to develop ideas that favoured regimes based on fundamental fairness
and respect for the individual," Nick Bala, a former student now on the
Queen's law faculty, said in a eulogy at Soberman's funeral on July 20
in Kingston.
Soberman's integrity, civility and sense of fairness caused him to be in
demand as a mediator, adviser and investigator. He served on both the
Ontario and the federal human rights commissions.
In 1991, he was appointed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to
investigate the complaints of 17 Inuit families who had been relocated
to the High Arctic in the 1950s from their home in northern Quebec. Left
to fend for themselves in an alien environment, they barely survived.
Told at the time that they were going to a place of better hunting, the
Inuit came to believe that they had been cynically used to establish
Canadian sovereignty in an unpopulated territory. They were determined
to battle for compensation and an apology.
Soberman visited Inukjuak, Pond Inlet, Frobisher Bay, Grise Fiord and
Resolute Bay and conducted interviews with two dozen of the original 87
resettled Inuit and their descendants, taking photographs of everyone as
well as of the harsh landscape to fully document their experience.
His son David Soberman, now a professor of marketing at the Rotman
School of Management in Toronto, remembers the "amazing slide show" in
the Soberman living room after his father's northern journeys.
"My father was passionate about photography. When we were looking for a
picture of him after his death, we realized that he was not in any of
our family photographs because he was taking them," David said.
The Soberman report recommended that the federal government apologize
for the treatment of the relocated Inuit, pointing out that it had
reneged on a promise to return the Inuit to their homes if they wished
and had failed to provide adequate housing, nursing or school facilities
at Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay. He advised the government to officially
acknowledge the Inuit contribution to Canadian sovereignty in the North,
thank them for it, and fund the return to Quebec of any members of the
original families who wished to go home.
Soberman told the press at the time that he had been impressed with
Inuit testimony, and although evidence about the government's
geopolitical objective was circumstantial, "this does not mean it is
insignificant."
Soberman served as deputy chair of the Electoral Boundaries Commission
in the 1980s, and was involved a decade earlier in drafting the Canadian
Corporations Act.
Keenly interested in academic freedom and university governance, he
wrote a study on tenure for the Canadian Association of University
Teachers (CAUT), tracing its legal basis. According to Michiel Horn,
emeritus professor of history at York University, it cleared up a lot of
misunderstandings; in 1997 CAUT awarded Soberman its Milner Prize for
outstanding contributions to academic freedom. Horn used the Soberman
report in his 1999 book Academic Freedom in Canada: A History.
Soberman was often asked to mediate disputes between university faculty
and administrators. Fluently bilingual, having learned French while on
sabbatical in Paris in 1973-74, he once settled a bitter dispute at
Laval University in Quebec entirely in French.
Daniel Allan Soberman was born in Toronto on Oct. 19, 1929, one of two
sons of Joseph (Jack) and Rose Soberman. (Younger brother Richard became
a professor of civil engineering at U of T.) His father was a restless
man who tried running various businesses, none successfully.
"He was born into a Jewish family, and his parents were far from rich,"
Michiel Horn recalled. "In the late 1930s they moved up to Kirkland
Lake, which, being a gold-mining town, boomed during the Depression
years while other Ontario communities suffered. There Dan's father took
a long lease on a bowling alley and earned a good living until the
miners struck in 1941. The strike lasted for a year and during that time
the Soberman bowling alley went broke. Dan told the story with wry
humour, but made it clear that the effects on the family were dire."
The Sobermans moved back to Toronto, where they gave the bowling alley
business another try, but in the days before automated pin setters, the
work was hard and the profit minimal. Daniel attended Harbord Collegiate
Institute, a haven then for academically gifted Jewish boys, but before
he could complete high school the family moved to Halifax, where his
parents opened a shoe store. His mother's death from cancer in 1950, at
age 47, was devastating. His father, who had developed emphysema,
eventually moved back to Toronto to open yet another store, this time
selling furniture.
Meanwhile, Soberman, who had graduated from Queen Elizabeth High School
in Halifax in 1946, took a B.A. at Dalhousie University, followed by a
law degree. He was admitted to the Nova Scotia bar in 1952. After
practising for a couple of years, he obtained a master's degree in law
from Harvard University in 1955, qualifying him to teach at the
university level, which he did at Dalhousie.
Legal education in Canada was expanding in the post-war boom. Queen's
University had made two attempts at founding a law school in the 19th
century but failed each time - due at least in part to the intransigence
of the benchers of the Law Society of Upper Canada, who refused to
charter any competitor to Osgoode Hall. They barely tolerated the
upstart law school at the University of Toronto. Now, however, after
some arm-twisting by the government of Ontario, they were prepared to
permit a new law school at Queen's.
In 1957, the smart, Harvard-trained teacher - at 27, Soberman was hardly
older than his students - was wooed away from Dalhousie to become one of
three founding professors who taught the inaugural law class of 23 men
and one woman at Queen's. (The other two were Stuart Ryan and Queen's
vice-principal J.A. Corry.)
Soberman's task was to build up the law school's tiny library. Since so
much of Canadian law is based on English common law, he went to London
to buy British legal tomes. Coincidentally, he renewed a friendship with
Patricia Burrage, a French teacher, that had begun by chance on a summer
trip to Europe a few years earlier. After the couple were married in
1958, she became a professor of French at Queen's.
Their son David was born in 1960, followed by daughters Julia (1963) and
Gail (1965). Trained as a lawyer at Queen's, Julia is bilingual counsel
at the Law Society of Upper Canada, while Gail is a geological engineer
living in Madrid.
Soberman was dean of law at Queen's from 1967 to 1977 and continued to
teach at Queen's and elsewhere until 2001, the year he turned 72. For
six months that final year, he lectured on Canadian corporate and
contract law at Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, Japan. He had
taught the same subject in 1985 in Beijing.
Students remember his kindness and tact and his ability to sharpen their
focus. "He taught us to get to the point," recalled Kingston-based
lawyer Linda Willcox of the class of '83.
"It was his enthusiasm for his subject that captivated his students,"
said Ron Watts, principal emeritus of Queen's and a friend since the
days when he and Soberman were both young professors at the university.
In addition to the law and photography, Soberman enjoyed racing his
Laser 28 sailboat, listening to opera and classical music (until
recently, he was on the board of the Kingston Symphony Orchestra) and
indulging his love of Scottish country dancing.
"Dan had a wide range of interests. You could talk to him about anything
and he would know something about it," said Watts. "And on any issue he
had a practical sense of judgment. I was principal when he was dean and
his counsel was always wise and balanced."
Daniel Soberman leaves his wife Patricia, children David, Julia and
Gail, his brother Richard and grandchildren, Mark, Ellen, Samuel and Lucy.
--
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