“Fed-up with jokes that unfairly typecast them as ambulance-chasers or worse, Canada’s lawyers are considering drastic means to rehabilitate their image, including striking a truth and reconciliation task force to find out why they ‘can’t get no respect’ from the public.” Truth and reconciliation commissions came to prominence as an innovation employed in countries such as South Africa seeking to overcome highly repressive or acrimonious national pasts. Halifax lawyer Robert Patzelt, who chairs a Canadian Bar Association committee looking into the idea, said “it may be necessary to accept that the profession is far from perfect and that it may, to some extent, have contributed to some of its own image problems.” All talk of “truth commissions” aside, that last bit sure sounds like progress to us — and a decided improvement over the circle-the-wagons reaction to criticism so often adopted by organized lawyerdom in the U.S. (Cristin Schmitz, “Objection! Lawyers lament poor public image”, CanWest/Montreal Gazette, Aug. 16).

Filed under: Canada, South Africa