Celebrating the life of Professor Emeritus Dan Soberman, LLD ‘08

Professor Emeritus Jon Thompson, UNB; Donald Savage, former Executive Director of CAUT; Dean Bill Flanagan;  Principal Daniel Woolf (Artsci ’80); The Right Honourable David Johnston, Law ’66, LLD ’91, Governor General of Canada; John Hucker, former Secretary General of CHRC; Patricia Soberman (MA '63); Julia Soberman, Law ’89 (Artsci ’85); and David Soberman (AppSci '81, MBA '83)

Dean Bill Flanagan

Queen’s Law community members and friends joined the Soberman family to pay tribute to one of the school’s pioneers, an outstanding contributor to the Faculty, University and Canadian society.  The Celebration of Life for Professor Emeritus Dan Soberman, LLD ‘08, was held in Grant Hall on October 17, 2010.

In his opening remarks, Dean Bill Flanagan said, “I am honoured to follow in the footsteps of my distinguished predecessors, Dan Soberman pre-eminent among them, who have done so much to advance the interests of our school and students.” He recounted Soberman’s accomplishments during his nine-year deanship -- from dramatically expanding the curriculum, starting the Master of Laws program, establishing the scholarly Queen’s Law Journal, and developing clinical programs. “It was a remarkable legacy of achievement,” he said. 

Flanagan also spoke of Soberman as a highly regarded expert in business law, who helped draft the Canada Business Corporations Act in the late 1960s, “legislation that transformed, and remains the basis of corporate law in Canada to this day.”

Having joined Queen’s Law in the final decade of Soberman’s academic career, Flanagan reflected on his personal experience. “Dan was always an unfailingly generous and thoughtful colleague,” he said. “It was always clear to me how deeply he cared about the school, the legal profession, and our role as teachers and scholars.”

Principal Daniel Woolf

Principal Daniel Woolf (Artsci ‘80) spoke of Soberman’s outstanding work as a builder, administrator and teacher, which were recognized with such honours as the Queen’s Law Alumni Award in 1997 and the University Council’s Distinguished Service Award in 1993.

“As one of the Law Faculty’s founding members, who served two distinguished terms as Dean, Dan Soberman helped shape and guide the Faculty from its very beginnings,” he said. “One of the school’s most respected professors until his retirement at age 71, Dan Soberman will be remembered as a legal pioneer, scholar, leader and teacher.” 

His Excellency, the Right Honourable David Johnston, Law ‘66, LLD ‘91, Governor General of Canada, began by speaking about his former teacher and colleague as a builder. “It’s no wonder that Queen’s Law Faculty got off to such a splendid start in 1957…because its founding professors were J. Alex Corry, Stuart Ryan and Dan. What an extraordinary combination of talent, and what an extraordinary contribution Dan made to the trinity! He brought enormous energy and enthusiasm; he was a visionary and, at the same time, an intensely practical person. And then…he became dean…to lead the Faculty to another level. We see the results today.” 

Governor General David Johnston

To illustrate Soberman’s leadership, the Governor General told a personal story of how his teacher gave him private tutorials in Mortgages and Civil Procedure – just so the Cambridge law graduate would be prepared to take the Ontario Bar Ad exams after only one year of Canadian legal studies. “Dan was a warm human being,” he said. 

Speaking of Soberman as a lawyer’s lawyer, he referred to his former colleague’s areas of specialization -- corporate law and constitutional law, which some consider to be at either end of the legal spectrum. “But for Dan they both had to do with self-governance, how institutions evolved to manage property and people, and both provided frameworks within which a society creates prosperity and also empowers individuals with the rules that make men and women free. And that is how Dan saw the law -- seamless, and built upon a series of fundamental principles, and it all fit whenever he spoke about the law.”

Governor General Johnston concluded by expressing the enduring value of Soberman’s legacy through a proverb: “‘Blessed is the man who plants a tree knowing he will not be there to enjoy its shade.’ Today we honour a tree planter extraordinaire.”

John Hucker

John Hucker, former Secretary General of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, also remembered his 1960s faculty colleague as having “enormous energy and enthusiasm,” focusing them both on academic excellence and the practical realities of administrating the law school -- ensuring everything from classroom availability to a functional library.

Hucker also commented that Soberman was an ideal human rights adjudicator because he was not only a good lawyer, but also a good listener, citing two of his well-reasoned decisions in high-profile cases. “Dan was always committed to public service and did excellent work as a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission boards of inquiry and the Canadian Human Rights tribunal.” Because of this reputation, Hucker added, in the 1990s he became the obvious person to lead the CHRC’s inquiry into the forced resettlement of Inuit from northern Quebec to remote Arctic locations that had occurred four decades earlier. “What came through in Dan’s eloquent report (as in his other work) was his strong moral sense and his sympathy for those who were the less powerful members of our society.”

Donald Savage

Donald Savage, former Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), talked about Soberman’s instrumental involvement with the Association, resulting in his receipt of the 1997 Milner Award, CAUT’s highest recognition for contributions to the development of academic freedom in Canadian universities.

Savage told how Soberman’s 1965 report on the status of tenure in Canadian universities proved to be “enormously influential,” and was cited by historian Michiel Horn as one of the “two most important documents in the development of the professoriate in Canada after World War II.” Further, his ideas for university procedures for granting tenure and for dismissing a tenured professor in order to ensure fairness and provide a defence for academic freedom “may seem commonplace now, but were revolutionary at the time.” These recommendations would become adopted nation-wide, with Soberman frequently called upon to act as an arbitrator, a role in which he applied his principles to actual academic cases under collective agreements, with judgments demonstrating his interest in fairness and justice. According to Savage, Soberman’s judgments in both the Mathieson case at Dalhousie University and the Chouinard case at the University of Ottawa “should be required reading in any training course for academic administrators.”

Jon Thompson

Professor Emeritus Jon Thompson of the University of New Brunswick, who worked with Soberman on two arbitration matters in the 1990s, spoke of his former colleague as “a force for reason and fairness.” Based on two key citations in the CAUT procedural guide “What is Fair?” and his own experience in serving on boards chaired by other arbitrators, Thompson found that awards written by Soberman were accorded considerable weight. “Each of these two types of contribution by Dan -- first designing an eloquent, widely adopted, theoretical framework and then helping to ensure its practical implementation -- go ‘way beyond what many academics achieve during their lifetime. He did both. And this was a remarkable feat.”  

Thompson recalled that when faculty associations and CAUT moved toward collective bargaining in the 1970s, even though Soberman was not in favour of his 1965 program being implemented this way, he was nevertheless at the forefront helping to ensure that the complicated process could work in the university sector and benefit both the institutions and faculty members. “The result of the combined efforts by many across the country, a process of which Dan was a leader, is that academic freedom is now better protected in Canada than anywhere else in the world, while at the same time the international stature of research in our universities has grown substantially.”

In conclusion, Thompson observed that Soberman was not only a renaissance man, but an enlightenment man. “His personal presence, the general commanding and reassuring aura that he managed to exude by just being there, was just as important as his technical writings in inspiring confidence that difficult human problems can be solved by reason when leavened by fairness. He and other leaders of his generation helped build the post-war Canadian society that we all have enjoyed, and in which, so far, even the most difficult political problems have been resolved.”

Julia Soberman

Julia Soberman, Law ‘89 (Artsci ‘85), closed the ceremony by thanking the organizers and speakers on behalf of the Soberman family. Noting that Dan would have turned 81 just two days later, she said, “This celebration of his life and achievements has been the most wonderful birthday gift to my father.”

Watch a recording of the Celebration of Life service at https://qshare.queensu.ca/Groups/law/www/sobermanTribute.html (Answer “no” to a Security Warning pop-up. If video does not play, install Adobe Flash Player)

See the photo gallery at http://law.queensu.ca/news/archives/october2010/
celebrateLifeSoberman/sobermanTributePhotos1.html  

Read about the life and work of Professor Emeritus Dan Soberman at http://law.queensu.ca/news/archives/september2010/inMemoriamSoberman.html 

Photos by Bernard Clark