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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63120 Medium Bertha Wilson: from a law firm's research desk to the Supreme Court

Read the following passage.

A. Bertha Wilson was born Bertha Wernham in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on September 18, 1923. She earned a master's degree at the University of Aberdeen in 1944 and a teaching diploma the following year. In December 1945 she married John Wilson, a Presbyterian minister, and in 1949 the couple moved to Canada. When she asked about studying law at Dalhousie University in the mid-1950s, the dean told her to go home and take up crocheting. She was admitted all the same, was called to the bar of Nova Scotia and then, in 1959, to the bar of Ontario.

B. For about 16 years Wilson worked at Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt, a large Toronto law firm. She specialized in legal research and in writing opinions on a wide range of subjects for the firm's other lawyers. In the late 1950s she founded the firm's research group, which still prepares opinions and legal arguments for major deals and court cases. Osler made her a partner in 1968. In December 1975 she was appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the first woman to sit on that court.

C. In 1982, after strong pressure from feminists to name a woman to the Supreme Court of Canada, Wilson became the first woman on its bench. She joined the court just as it began to apply the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and she helped to shape how the Charter was understood. In R. v. Morgentaler in 1988, she was part of the majority that struck down the country's abortion law. In R. v. Lavallee in 1990, she wrote the court's decision accepting that evidence about battered women could be considered in a claim of self-defence.

D. Wilson retired from the Supreme Court on January 4, 1991, after eight years there, saying that her energy had diminished. Later that year, she was named by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Shortly before she retired, she had set out her own view of women in the law. In 1990 she gave a lecture at Osgoode Hall Law School with the title "Will women judges really make a difference?" She ended it by arguing that if women lawyers and judges could bring "a new humanity" to decision making, "perhaps they will make a difference."

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
A large part of her job at the Toronto firm was preparing research for colleagues.

- 2.
Once she had left the Supreme Court, the prime minister chose her for a royal commission.

- 3.
She was much older than most of her classmates when she began her legal studies.

- 4.
Someone in charge at a university openly tried to put her off studying law.

- 5.
Her firm gave her a partnership several years before she first became a judge.

- 6.
She left the Supreme Court after less than a decade, explaining that she felt less energetic.

- 7.
Activists had pressed for a female justice before she joined the Supreme Court.

- 8.
One judgment she wrote let past abuse count when a woman said she had protected herself.

- 9.
She agreed to join the royal commission because she cared deeply about Indigenous issues.

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