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Interview with Donna Miller 251
on the ground floor of the notion that women had equal credibility in the
profession, that we could become strong experienced counsel and an integral part
of the profession.
BPS: To put it directly, why were you in law school I was in law school
because I was getting lonely in physics. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a practising
lawyer, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the degree. Did you have a sense
of a career path when you went to law school
DJM: I did, and the career I’ve had is nothing what I thought it would be. I
went into law school because I thought I wanted to be a journalist writing on the
law, but I never got into journalism. The best part of my legal education was my
articling year. It helped to give me some sense of what I wanted to achieve and
where I wanted to go in my pursuit of law and the practice of law. It helped
develop my understanding of law, more so than what I learned within the
classroom setting itself.
Don’t forget in those days there was no real clinical practice of law within the
three years of law school, it was almost all principles, all theory. That is an
essential part of legal training, but it is not the exclusive component. So the
articling year helped to bring all the principles into some sense of coherent whole
for me.
BPS: In that year did the women in the law school feel that because there
were now a significant proportion of women law students, that they were just law
students like the rest, or was there still a sense of being pioneers who were facing
special challenges as women in the practice of law.
DJM: We didn’t think of ourselves as pioneers at all. I think in fact, looking
back at the time of the early 70s, women were coming into their own across all of
the professions, finally becoming not just an exceptional part of those professions
but an integral part. We didn’t think of ourselves as pioneers in law, we were part
and parcel of the student body along with everyone else. And in those days we
were very idealistic for the most part – I certainly was. If you asked why I was in
law school, one reason as I mentioned was to pursue legal journalism, but another
reason was because I had this great hope that I could help to make a more just
society, and I think actually most of us had that aspiration.
BPS: Another difference you would see in law school today is a very
significant proportion of Aboriginal students. Were there any Aboriginal students
when you were in law school
DJM: In fact two of my classmates were Aboriginal. One was Ovide Mercredi,
who eventually became the Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, and
another was Marion Ironquill-Meadmore, who I believe became the first woman
of First Nation descent to be admitted to the bar in Canada. Ovide and Marion
were pioneers, they were certainly among the first.
Years later, when Ovide was head of the Assembly and I was the Manitoba
official on Senate reform throughout the Charlottetown Accord constitutional