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Diary offers inside look at famous Toronto lawyer, Student examines life with Ruby, justice reporter KIRK MAKIN writes, By KIRK MAKIN, Globe and Mail. Monday, December 9, 2002 Page B11
Munyonzwe Hamalengwa is a writer, a lawyer and an outsider -- and a book he has just published nicely marries all three.
How Are We Gonna Win This One acquired a special perch in legal publishing just by coming off the presses this fall. For one thing, no Canadian lawyer had yet written about a year in the articling trenches. Equally resourceful, Mr. Hamalengwa had the gumption to self-publish through his own company -- Out of Africa Press.
Simply publishing a diary about a year of articling probably would be enough to capture the interest of most lawyers, but what elevates the book to an entertaining read is the firm Mr. Hamalengwa articled for: Ruby and Edwardh.
The firm is the destination of choice for a great many
litigants with fascinating and high-profile cases, a haven of civil
libertarian thought and, according to popular legend, a sweat shop for
junior lawyers. Located just a cappuccino toss from Toronto's Yorkville
district, the many luminaries dispatched through its swinging doors include
Michael Code, Melvyn Green, Julian Falconer and Frank Addario.
Mr. Ruby, of course, is a bona fide Canadian celebrity. It is doubtful that any other lawyer has been profiled as often in the media or acquired such a lasting case of camera burn. For Mr. Ruby, winning cases is Job One, but publicizing them is Job Two. The firm's cramped library probably ranks second only to the Ottawa Press Theatre for the number of news conferences it has held.
Mr. Hamalengwa writes that he elicited the same reaction over and over when people learned where he was going to article. "You are going to article for a slave driver?" asked one incredulous friend who had articled there.
Mr. Hamalengwa discovered that Mr. Ruby indeed could be a hard and unyielding taskmaster. But he also found his principal to be a straight-shooting legal genius, capable of reciting law reports or entire sections of the Criminal Code at breakneck speed from memory.
The author marvels at how strong divisions of opinion are about Mr. Ruby. His admirers gush with praise for his legal instincts, courtroom skills and unswerving devotion to civil libertarian causes. His detractors all but foam at the mouth, maligning Mr. Ruby as a sanctimonious blowhard and a silk-stocking socialist.
In contrast, there is nothing remotely controversial about Ms. Edwardh.
Widely recognized as one of the finest criminal lawyers of her era, she habitually ducks publicity unless it will clearly further her client's interests.
"She has no ego whatsoever," Mr. Hamalengwa sums up.
A colourful, fringe player in the legal world, Mr. Hamalengwa has the questionable distinction of having both run for mayor of Toronto and sued an appellate court judge. Still, he was in some ways perfect Ruby and Edwardh material. An immigrant from Zambia, Mr. Hamalengwa spent a year as a political prisoner in Tanzania. He later survived a stint at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he felt grossly alienated from what he viewed as a privileged, white-bread student body possessed of an unsavoury sense of entitlement.
Twelve years after his articling year, Mr. Hamalengwa's diary rampages through Ruby and Edwardh like a well-meaning bull set loose in the proverbial china shop. Suffice to say, not all of his revelations are flattering or discreet -- and some are borderline mean-spirited.
Of the much-discussed relationship between Mr. Ruby and legal leviathan Edward Greenspan, for example, Mr. Hamalengwa writes: "I have read the correspondence between these two great lawyers, and I can attest that they have the greatest of hate against each other's guts. Venom has spewed between these great lawyers. It is frightening."
He recounts many episodes of office intrigue and recrimination, beginning with a blast he took from Mr. Ruby early in his tenure for producing "a damn loser" of a factum.
Three floors away, a receptionist heard the scolding.
Again, you can almost smell the fear and resentment as Mr. Hamalengwa -- who has a paralyzing fear of standard-gear-shift vehicles -- attempts time after time to avoid commands that he drive Mr. Ruby's Aston Martin across town.
In one conspiratorial aside, Mr. Hamalengwa tells of helping Ms. Edwardh smuggle law reports out of the library shortly after Mr. Ruby had upbraided her for doing so. He also turns the reader into a voyeur, scanning a list of lawyers to whom the firm refers cases, only to discover that several names have been crossed out.
"Falling out with Clay means falling out," Mr. Hamalengwa observes. "The rupture never seems to be patched up."
In court, you flush crimson alongside Mr. Hamalengwa when a snooty judge upbraids him for acting like a real lawyer, and when prosecutors bump him to the back of the line and beckon forward more familiar defence faces.
Mr. Hamalengwa encounters similar outrages on the home front, such as the palpable anger he feels when he fancies that a rival articling student has conspired behind the scenes to make him look bad in the eyes of his principals.
In short, Mr. Hamalengwa conveys the hopefulness, frustration and paranoia that is common to many an articling student. Everything is generally always in a state of incompleteness," he opines.
How Are We Gonna Win This One is not a polished work. It is sometimes eccentric, self-regarding, rough and rambling. It contains some memorable malapropisms and has the dubious distinction of being one of the few books ever published that sports a prominent typographical error in its subtitle: Doing Time For Clayton C. Ruby, Criminal Lawyer Extraodinaire.
However, Mr. Hamalengwa (his e-mail address is mhamalengwa@sympatico.ca) is relentlessly candid, and often finds just the right phrase to capture the joy and frustration of daily events.
In the end, you take his book for what it is: a rocky but often-engaging chronicle of a memorable year in the life of a fledgling lawyer.
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Criminal Lawyers Association The Law Society Of Upper Canada
Last Modified: August 11, 2007
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