Retired and working.

• Date: 22 September 2006
• Author: Kerans, Roger Philip

I retired from the Bench at sixty-three, after ten years as a trial judge and seventeen as an appeal judge. In Canada, judges are appointed for "life," which constitutionally ends at age 75. So why quit twelve years before I was required to do so? Therein lies a tale.

When we were young, my law partner and I decided that a stimulating lifestyle requires a career change every decade or so, and we both tried to do that. He did it by moving in and out of politics, but that was not for me. Because I had started my career as trial judge with the District Court and Queen's Bench in Alberta, the move from trial to appeal work when I was appointed to the Court of Appeal was like a career change for me, and I found both careers stimulating. But after seventeen years as an appeal judge, I was finding little in the way of new challenges. And it was learning as much as we could from new challenges to which my partner and I had committed ourselves long before.

I confess that I hesitated to consider any form of a retirement career. To return to a lawyer's career or to move to a different career after retirement would be to buck a strong tradition, one that held sway through generations for Canadian and British judges. Followed throughout the British Commonwealth, that limiting tradition was expressed this way by an Irish Court: "[W]ith security of tenure and fixed and adequate remuneration and pension, the practice of the profession of the law is abandoned [forever] by the person appointed." (1) Although it is in form addressed only to the situation of the judge who considers a return to the practice of law, the spirit of that decision would apply to his taking up any remunerated...