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12 years ago tomorrow, I wrote the LSAT. It was the morning after my cousin Troy's wake. In between the wake and the funeral I came into to Edm to take the test, and rushed back to Maskwacis for his funeral. That evening, my brother went into the hospital with a strep infection.
It got into his blood and organs. We almost lost him - he was in ICU for a month and in the hospital for 8. Aside from the blessing of my brother still being around, I was also lucky to be able to write the test in the sliver of time between family emergencies.
I hear a lot of talk about the LSAT as being a neutral indicator of future success at law school. Setting aside whether that is true or not, there is often a failure to consider the inequity of life outside the 3 hours of the test, where neutrality is a myth, a dream.
There is much talk at law schools about diversity. I read somewhere we have had 90 SCC judges in our history, and 85 have been Christian and the other 5 Jewish. None have ever been a visible minority. None were women until the 1980s.
People will talk about lack of diversity in the field generally as a reason for lack of diversity on the bench, and other requirements like being dual-linguistic in French and English (but no other language counts). But never giving mind to the original gatekeeping.
The legal profession is not representative of the Canadian population or even the workforce in terms of diversity. Progression doesn't just naturally happen, it requires active force.
https://ccdi.ca/media/2019/dbtn_tlp_2016.pdf
https://ccdi.ca/media/2019/dbtn_tlp_2016.pdf
Anyways, this has been on my mind because I have been thinking about my cousin and the time he passed. (I didn't make it back in time for the funeral, just the afterwards). And then how that period is intertwined with my journey into the legal profession.
And it makes me think of the stories of all the brilliant and caring people we don't hear, who miss tests, don't have the resources or time to study for them, whose lives are intertwined with family to the point that they are 'selected out' by life's various arbitrary gates.
