Claire L'Heureux-Dubé is a meticulously researched, beautifully written, and complex study of a controversial and transformative Canadian judge. It may be the best book yet written by Constance Backhouse, and this is not a comment to be made lightly given the awards and accolades that have been accorded to her earlier books. But this biography is exceptional in many ways.

Backhouse writes in her prologue that the book was researched and written through a feminist lens: “a recognition that gender matters, that discrimination exists, that resistance and backlash follow, that our society would be a better place if there were greater inclusion and equality, and that biographical research should take account of all this” (xiii). Backhouse challenges the limitations of traditional biography. She goes beyond “high-profile cases” (3), although these are not ignored. The book explores the social and cultural setting in which L'Heureux-Dubé became the second woman, and the first woman from Quebec, appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada and “trains a more concentrated focus on Claire L'Heureux-Dubé’s personal life” (3) than is common in judicial biographies. Backhouse admits this more intimate approach creates a potential risk that the book could play into the gendered dynamic of placing the personal lives of successful women “under the microscope” (3). Ultimately, however, she illustrates this level of detail is necessary; the judicial is informed by the personal and we cannot understand any public figure, whatever that person's gender, without some background about the individual's experiences and values. Backhouse gathered this detailed information not only through traditional written sources, but also by completing “over two hundred oral interviews with her [L'Heureux-Dubé], her siblings and daughter, childhood friends, school and university classmates, law school classmates, law partners, law clerks, journalists, politicians, litigants, law professors, lawyers, and judges across Canada and beyond” (xii).

Backhouse begins her analysis with a review of the Ewanchuk case “that catapulted… [L'Heureux-Dubé] onto the front page of newspapers” (8). L'Heureux-Dubé authored a concurring decision that refuted the sexist language of a lower court judge in a sexual assault case, explicitly denouncing the “‘mythical assumptions’ that portrayed women who said no as ‘really saying yes, try again, or persuade me’” (13). The lower court judge responded with an unprecedented and deeply personal public attack on L'Heureux-Dubé. The episode created national and “international judicial conversations” (19).

In the remainder of the book, Backhouse explores “who was the woman behind the Ewanchuk decision…[and] how did she attain such legendary stature?” (19). She does so by meticulously recreating the details of L'Heureux-Dubé’s life, from her early years in Rimouski, through her time as a pensionnaire at a cloistered girls’ school, her enrolment in law school, and her work in private practice in Quebec City where she received a job offer from a Jewish lawyer “at a time when no French Canadian lawyer would hire her” (4). Backhouse details how L'Heureux-Dubé faced hostility in the workforce, and that even her own father disapproved of her ground-breaking work as a woman lawyer (162). Although she married, she did not allow marriage, or the arrival of children, to derail her career, despite her husband's suicide and her son's juvenile delinquency, mental health problems, and early death. She received judicial appointments to the Quebec Superior Court in 1973, to the Quebec Court of Appeal in 1979, and to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1987 (5).

Backhouse reminds readers of the challenges H'Heureux-Dubé faced negotiating a legal world that was resolutely masculinist. Yet, she also reminds us that L'Heureux-Dubé entered the law before the emergence of feminism as a political movement and did not, and does not, identify as a feminist (5). Having set the stage for L'Heureux-Dubé’s career on the Supreme Court of Canada, Backhouse explores a series of cases and areas of law in which she was particularly influential: sexual assault, spousal support, human rights for same-sex couples, and sex discrimination in tax law. She also critiques the limitations of L'Heureux-Dubé’s vision with regard to race relations, highlighted through a discussion of the Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) case.

In the final substantive section of the book, Backhouse describes L'Heureux-Dubé’s extensive work for international judicial education and documents the most recent controversy in which she has been involved: the Proposed Quebec Charter of Values in 2013. Based on her own rejection of Catholicism, L'Heureux-Dubé advocated rules based in secularism and “did not appear to recognize the potential for damage when rules prohibiting religious dress were promulgated within a society exhibiting pervasive discrimination against Muslims” (533).

L'Heureux-Dubé, as Backhouse illustrates, is a remarkable and complex woman and an exceptional judge whose innovative legal approach “was anchored in context, giving explicit recognition to the social, economic and political realities that impacted her cases” (3). This biography understands L'Heureux-Dubé herself as being similarly immersed in and influenced by context. In this way, it tells us a great deal not only about L'Heureux-Dubé, but also legal education and practice, the distinctive history of Quebec, the workings of the Supreme Court of Canada, and changing gender norms. Ultimately, although Backhouse critiques aspects of L'Heureux-Dubé’s legal legacy, this is a lively, respectful biography of a complicated woman whose life and work are deeply worthy of study. This biography is exceptionally rich, and it is to be hoped, as Backhouse notes, that in the future, “fuller analysis of important personal details may…become more regular inclusions in biographies of male and female judges alike” (4).