Last week, news broke that Jeffrey Ewert, a convicted murderer whose attack on a 15-year-old girl left her permanently disabled, had been attending McGill University’s faculty of law. As a young female lawyer and recent law school graduate, I wish I could say I was surprised by my peers’ response. I was not.
According to Ewert’s correctional file, he “exhibits the need to dominate and control women.” Until recently, he shared a classroom with future female lawyers. There is a bitter irony in asking women entering a profession that demands confidence, advocacy and strength to share their education with a man whose own file describes a need to dominate and control women.
I have watched members of my profession defend Ewert’s admission to McGill in the language of rehabilitation, reconciliation and compassion for his circumstances as an Indigenous man. These principles matter. But the debate surrounding his admission reveals how easily lawyers can become so absorbed in defending principles in the abstract that they lose sight of the people affected by their application.