In an article in the Toronto Star, titled Russell Brown doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court, a former law professor attacks Justice Brown based on two main themes:
1) He is not a liberal, so he can't be a good judge.
2) The timing is bad and he has done some unethical stuff.
With respect to number one: fine. If you don't want someone with his ideology on the bench, so be it. But with respect to the second attack, it goes as follows:
Third, while attacks on political parties and policies, and on legal decisions, are open to virtually anyone, such partisanship in judges violates judicial ethics. For two and a half years before he was named to the Supreme Court, Justice Brown was a member of Alberta’s superior court and, then, its appeal court, and was obliged to preserve his neutrality on questions of law and politics. The timing of his blogged rants against decisions, judges and lawyers is not clear — they have disappeared from the Internet — one hopes and assumes this practice stopped at the time of his initial judicial appointment.
However, his role as adviser to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, an organization that advances conservative positions that often are inconsistent with the terms of the constitution and with decided cases, continued all the time that he was a judge in Alberta’s courts. While promotion by a judge of constitutional positions that are contrary to the Charter’s terms, and to judicial decisions made under it, is not a clear indication of how cases would be decided, suspicions of predisposition and questions of judicial decorum most certainly arise.
I have bolded the two main ethical attacks. The second one is just false. If the author has proof of this, then let him produce this. Indeed, in all the actual articles by the press (even the hostile one) has never made that claim. Indeed, for almost three years, it would have been very easy for anyone to have made that claim against Justice Brown while he was on the court, especially since his court was hearing cases brought by the JCCF.
The first attack is also worded in such a way to suggest that he may had been blogging when he was on the bench. While this by itself is not necessarily an issue, in Justice Brown's case it is false. The press stories about his blogging clearly show that his posts were in 2007 and 2008 almost 4 years before he was appointed to the bench. All the author had to do was to check the dates on these archived albeit deleted posts.
