Rosalie Silberman Abella

Early Life and Family

Rosalie Silberman was born in a displaced persons’ (DP) camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in the year following the Second World War. Both her parents survived the Holocaust. They were originally from Poland, and were married on 3 September 1939, just as the Nazis were beginning to invade the country. The Nazis murdered Rosalie’s older brother, Julius, who was just two years old. Her father, Jacob, had studied law before the war. He was appointed head of legal services in a DP camp run by the US military.

The family was allowed to immigrate to Canada in May 1950. They arrived by way of the American troopship the USNS General Stuart Heintzelman, which carried the family from Bremerhaven, Germany, to Halifax’s Pier 21. They came to Canada as refugees, but Jacob Silberman was not allowed to practice the law because he wasn’t a citizen. As such, he entered the country as a shepherd and underwear cutter. This had an impact on young Rosalie, who became determined to become a lawyer. Ultimately, her father had a successful career selling insurance until his death in 1970. Afterwards, Rosalie’s mother, Fanny, was successful in real estate.

Abella credits her father with instilling in her a deep love and respect of the law, and for encouraging her to accomplish her dreams. Abella has stated that her father treated her as an equal from about the age of 12, which she credits with stimulating her intellectual confidence. She credits her mother with instilling in her the virtues of courage and charity.

Education

By the age of 10, young Rosalie Silberman was a well-known piano prodigy. She won many awards and appeared often on television. She received a diploma in classical piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1964, and at the time was one of its youngest graduates. She has continued playing the piano throughout her life, and enjoys the repertoire of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.

She attended the University of Toronto, earning a BA in 1967 and an LLB in 1970. It was during her second year at the university that she met and fall in love with a PhD student in history, Irving Abella. They married in 1968 and had two sons, Jacob and Zachary, both of whom became lawyers.

Early Judicial Career

Rosalie Abella was called to the Ontario Bar in 1972. She practiced criminal and civil litigation for four years before being appointed to the Ontario Family Court in 1976. She was just 29 years old, and she was also pregnant. She became both the youngest person and the first pregnant person in Canadian history to be appointed as a judge. (See also Judiciary in Canada.)

In 1983, Abella was the author and chair of the Ontario Study on Access to Legal Services by the Disabled. In 1984, she was the sole commissioner of the federal government’s Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, also called the Abella Commission. It was in this role that she coined the term employment equity. She also developed the legal concepts of employment equity and discrimination, which were subsequently adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada during its first decision concerning equality rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1989. These concepts were later adopted by South Africa, New Zealand and Northern Ireland.

During this period, Abella moderated the English-language leaders’ debate during the 1988 federal election. She was also a member of the Canadian Judicial Council’s inquiry into the wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall Jr.

Ontario Court of Appeal

Abella was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992. In 1998, she wrote a landmark ruling that extended survivor benefits to same-sex couples. It was a pivotal moment in the effort to establish equal rights for Canada’s LGBTQ community.

Supreme Court of Canada

Abella was nominated to the Supreme Court of Canada by Prime Minister Paul Martin. She was formally appointed to the role on 30 August 2004. Abella retired from the bench on 1 July 2021, having reached the mandatory retirement age of 75. “Justice is the application of law to life,” she said in her parting address, “not just the application of laws to facts.”

On the eve of her retirement, the Globe and Mail’s Sean Fine wrote, “In her body of roughly 200 rulings spanning 17 years on Canada’s highest court and covering nearly every major area of law, she has fought for the underdog and the vulnerable, and helped set the court’s moral tone.” Acknowledging the scope of her influence, Sian Elias, a former chief justice of New Zealand, said, “Rosie Abella’s work in human rights and constitutional law on the Supreme Court… is drawn on by judges in all the senior courts of the Common Law world.”

Organizational Activity

Over the course of her career, Abella wrote 90 articles and co-authored four books. She has also been heavily involved in various public organizations. She has been chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, the Ontario Law Reform Commission and the Rhodes Selection Committee for Ontario. She was also a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the University of Toronto Academic Discipline Tribunal, the Ontario Public Service Labour Relations Tribunal, and the (Ontario) Premier’s Advisory Committee on Confederation. She served as a judge for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the director of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and the vice-chair of the board of governors of the National Judicial Institute.

Post-Judicial Career

After retiring from the Supreme Court, Abella was named a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. She is also a distinguished visiting jurist at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and the William Hughes Mulligan Distinguished Visiting Professor in International Studies at Fordham Law School.

Honours and Awards

Rosalie Abella was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. She was awarded the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the president of Germany in 2020. In 2023, she was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame for her humanitarianism. Also in 2023, Abella became the first Canadian judge to be the subject of a full-length documentary. Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella premiered at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.

Abella has received 40 honorary degrees. She has also been awarded the Rose Wolfe Distinguished Alumni Award of the University of Toronto, the Distinguished Service Award of the Ontario Bar Association, the Touchstone Award of the Canadian Bar Association, the Bora Laskin Award for Distinguished Service in Labour Law (see also Bora Laskin), the Calgary Peace Prize, and the International Justice Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation, among many others.

(See also Judiciary in Canada; Court System of Canada.)