In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus Dan Soberman, LLD ‘08

Photo by Bernard Clark

Professor Emeritus Dan Soberman, 1929-2010

A Queen’s Law pioneer, a beloved faculty colleague and teacher, has died. Professor Emeritus Daniel Soberman, a man of deep compassion who distinguished himself as a legal scholar and leader within Queen’s and Canadian society, passed away in Kingston on July 17 after battles with prostate cancer and heart disease.

His loss marks the end of an era. Soberman, 80, was one of three original faculty members in 1957, served two terms as the Faculty’s second Dean (1967-77) and remained one of its most respected professors until his late retirement at 71 in 2001. Hundreds of friends and colleagues recall his grasp, both broad and acute, of corporate and constitutional law and his ability to teach the law clearly, concisely and enthusiastically.

“These are two very different areas of law, and his ability to master them reflects his intellectual breadth,” says Professor Nick Bala, a colleague of Soberman’s at Queen’s Law for more than 20 years. “Both areas 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.”

As clearly shown at class reunions, his students, too, have only praise for their former professor. Martha Downey, Law ’81, who studied Contracts and Business Associations with him, says Soberman was “an outstanding teacher in every respect."   

Now practising child protection law in Kingston, Downey recalls: "Through his liveliness in the classroom, his ability to make sense out of voluminous jurisprudence, the practical perspectives that he brought to legal issues, and his sensible advice on matters affecting students generally and prospective lawyers in particular, he was able to 'make a difference.'  He was a kind person who always showed a genuine warmth for his students and a remarkable ability to impart to them his love and enthusiasm for the law and the legal profession."   

Soberman’s many high-profile appointments reflected his deep understanding of people and his ability to listen and reconcile disparate points of view. One example was the resolution in 1976 of a faculty union strike at the Université Laval in Quebec. Working in French, he led a mediation process that ended a bitter 55-day standoff and resulted in that university’s first faculty-administration collective agreement. In the 1990s he led a Canadian Human Rights Commission enquiry into the forced resettlement in the 1950s of Inuit from northern Quebec to remote Arctic locations. Many families barely survived. Soberman’s comprehensive fact-finding helped lead to this past summer’s long-awaited official apology by the federal government to the families and descendents of those who were relocated.

Dan was born in Toronto to Jack and Rose Soberman in 1929. His businessman father moved the family to Kirkland Lake, Ontario, in the 1930s to open a bowling alley. It prospered through the Depression, fuelled by recreation-hungry gold miners with cash to spare, but the business collapsed when the miners went on strike in 1941. The Sobermans returned to Toronto, where Dan became a star pupil at Harbord Collegiate Institute and his dad opened another bowling alley. Giving that up, he relocated the family to Halifax and opened a shoe store. Dan, meanwhile, finished high school and enrolled in Dalhousie University, where he earned a B.A. and a law degree.

Dan was admitted to the Nova Scotia bar in 1952. He practised for a couple of years, but the academic pull was strong, and he left Halifax to complete a master’s degree in law at Harvard. Then, in 1955, at the tender age of 25 – not much older than many of his students – he found himself on the faculty at his alma mater, Dalhousie.

Two years later Dan was lured to Queen’s, which had just been given the go-ahead by the Law Society of Upper Canada to establish a law school again. His partners in the effort were Queen’s Vice-Principal J.A. Corry and Professor Stuart Ryan. Soberman was the last survivor. As the junior of the trio (alumni from those years still remember “young Danny Soberman”) it was his job was to set up the library, so he travelled to England in 1958 to obtain the requisite texts. There he married Patricia (MA ’63), a British French teacher he had met a year earlier in Madrid who would go on to become a faculty colleague at Queen’s University, teaching French. They would have three children: David (AppSci ’81, MBA ‘83), Julia, Law ‘89 (Artsci ’85), and Gail (AppSci ’87).

At Queen’s, Soberman soon earned a reputation as a keen and enthusiastic teacher and a leader in legal education in Canada, which in the mid-1960s began growing by leaps and bounds. Soberman contributed to this expansion in many ways: by co-authoring various editions with James Smyth and Law Faculty colleague Alex Easson, The Law and Business Administration in Canada, a popular university textbook now in its 11th edition; by serving as President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and as a scholar of and advocate for tenure and academic freedom. He served on a task force that helped create the 1975 Business Corporations Act for Canada and also on both the Ontario and Canada human rights commissions. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Queen’s at Spring Convocation in 2008.

Apart from his professional accomplishments, Soberman will also be remembered as a renaissance man with a remarkably wide range of interests that included keel-boat sailing, music, photography, film and Scottish dancing.

“The key to Dan was that he was just a very humane person with a genuine and compassionate interest in people,” says Ron Watts, a political scientist and former Queen’s Principal who was one of Soberman’s closest friends. “If anyone came to him with a legal problem, even if he didn’t know the person well, he’d give that problem close consideration and offer his best advice. That was the kind of person he was.”

An Invitation: Join the Soberman family, Dean Flanagan, Queen’s Law faculty, staff, alumni and friends for a celebration of Dan Soberman’s life on Sunday, October 17, 2010, at 2:00 p.m. in Grant Hall at Queen’s University.