Mary Southin listens to tributes from fellow lawyers and judges during a retirement ceremony at the British Columbia Supreme Courthouse in Vancouver.Jeff Vinnick/The Globe and Mail
Mary Southin had one of the sharpest legal minds in British Columbia, and a remarkable career that spanned more than 50 years as a lawyer and judge.
While still a young lawyer, she made a name for herself representing a wide variety of clients including several trade unions and union members, and took on matrimonial cases at a time when the only acceptable ground for divorce was adultery.
She did criminal work, undertook commercial litigation, was an expert on wills and trusts, and other gnarly problems and stumbling blocks of life. Like her father, a First World War veteran who was wounded at Vimy Ridge, she appeared to be afraid of nothing.
She found ingenious arguments. According to her friend and colleague David Roberts, she got trade unionist Orville Braaten out of jail, where he had been sent for contempt of court, by invoking the ancient writ of “quo warranto” (“by what authority.”)
As a judge, she demanded precision and had a reputation for being tough but fair. Colleagues recall the case of a man who was a U.S. citizen appearing before her, charged with carrying a gun, expecting to be let off with a fine. After explaining to him that this was Canada and carrying such a weapon was both unnecessary and illegal, she sent him to jail for 30 days, to his great surprise.
And she was forthright in expressing her views. Of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, she said: We have “known for years that a charter of rights would bring political questions into the courts,” and described the Charter as “a piece of Liberal silliness we could have done without.”
On Sept. 24, just weeks before her 94th birthday, she died of unspecified causes at her home in Kerrisdale, in southwest Vancouver. She had refused to see a doctor.
Mary Frances Southin was born in Vancouver on Oct. 16, 1931, the third and youngest daughter of John William Southin, an engineer, and Blanche Southin (née Balkwill). Blanche was a schoolteacher who had studied at McGill University, and had taught in Bella Coola and Squamish, in B.C. The family moved around the province when the father’s work required it.
For a time they lived in Allenby, near Princeton, B.C., where her father was power plant superintendent of Granby Consolidated Mines. Here as a young teenager, she learned to be a crack bridge player, sometimes invited to make up a fourth with the grown ups.
Mary entered the University of British Columbia at 16, studying arts initially, before she was admitted to law school. In both her first and second years of law, she stood first in her class. She also joined the Progressive Conservative Party on campus. In the 1960s, she twice ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the House of Commons on the PC ticket.
She graduated from the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law in 1952, when she was 20, and was called to the B.C. bar in 1953. In 1969, she became the first woman appointed Queen’s Counsel in B.C.
At the Law Society of B.C., she was the first woman to be elected a bencher in 1971 and subsequently became treasurer in 1977, making her the first woman to head a law society in the British Commonwealth (the treasurer was the society’s chief officer). After serving four terms, she became a life bencher in 1980. Although clearly suited for her chosen work, she suffered a crisis of confidence mid-career and took a prolonged leave from her practice in 1966 to explore becoming an economist.
She went to live in London, England, studied Russian and joined a tour group organized by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, that crossed the USSR by train to Vladivostock. The food, she later told her family, was inedible. After some months, she changed her mind about economics, took a ship home across the Pacific, and returned to her law practice.
A woman of prodigious energy, she was from 1979 editor-in-chief of B.C. Law Reports but that ended when she was appointed to the Supreme Court of the province in 1985. Three years later, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed her to the B.C. Court of Appeal, where she served until her mandatory retirement in 2006.
Mary Southin was appointed to the Supreme Court of the B.C. in 1985.Jeff Vinnick/The Globe and Mail
When her colleagues got together to celebrate her 50 years in the legal profession, one young lawyer put together guidelines for how to appear before her in court: 1) Be prepared; 2) Know the law; 3) Wear black shoes. (Justice Southin, a stickler for proper court attire, opposed the wearing of brown shoes with a lawyers’ black robes.)
She was deeply attached to her Du Maurier cigarettes and never made an effort to give them up even when they brought her unwanted notoriety near the end of her legal career.
In 2003, when B.C. declared the Law Courts to be a smoke-free environment, she went right on smoking in her chambers. Vancouverites began to refer to her as “the Smoking Judge.”
The Attorney-General’s office, responsible for running the courts, announced that an air-filtering system would be installed in Justice Southin’s office so that she could continue her habit. At this, a Vancouver lawyer named Dugald Christie filed a complaint with the Canadian Judicial Council alleging that the air purifier, a gift solely for her benefit, would unduly influence the judge’s decisions if she had to hear a case involving the provincial government or one of its Crown corporations.
The Judicial Council dismissed the complaint. In the end – according to Susan Fisher, the judge’s niece – Justice Southin paid for the air purifier from her own pocket.
She never married but found a companion in Mary Payne, a nurse with whom she shared her home in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale neighbourhood. Contemporary society’s turn away from smoking deeply affected her life. When smoking restrictions were introduced, she stopped flying on long flights, eating in restaurants and going to movies. When she and Ms. Payne took a holiday in Banff, Alta., they took all their meals in their room.
Justice Southin leaves her partner, Ms. Payne; nieces, Martha Labadie, Ms. Fisher, Mary Henricksen, Leslie Sharp; nephew, Eric Drummond-Hay; and her godson, Matthew Payne.