Trained at Harvard prior to the First Great War, he was catapulted onto the national stage in the midst of the Second, with his appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada after 25 years of distinguished practise as counsel to Canadian National Railway. There, the measure of the man, his penetration of mind and firmness of principle was immediately revealed. These we perceive in a body of timeless judgments rendered from 1943 to 1959, in additional acts of public service as Royal Commissioner and arbitrator, and in his later life of pedagogy as Law Dean.

As a jurist, Rand is universally recognized as Canada's greatest civil libertarian in an era when our constitutional theory was still bounded by the British legacy of parliamentary supremacy. At the same time, he was a passionate exponent of the federal principle. Rand was celebrated as a judge of Solomonic wisdom, for whom law and justice were intimately intertwined. His voice reverberates even in our most recent constitutional jurisprudence, be it federalism, civil liberty or social justice which is engaged.

The UNB Faculty of Law's Ivan C. Rand Memorial Lecture series is made possible by generous donations from Canadian National and Abraham Calp and family.