The following is an interview with Professor Swan conducted by Emily Papsin, Editor-in-Chief of this paper from 2020-2021, now an articling student at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP. It was first published in Issue 3 of Volume 92 on 9 October 2018. Please enjoy. – Tomislav Miloš, Editor-in-Chief
When is your birthday? 10th of October. In two weeks I turn 80.
How do you feel about that? Some satisfaction – that’s what I’ve said to people. It’s like walking a mile; you just put one foot after the other and eventually you get there, you know?
Where were you born? My parents’ home was in Donegal, but in those days, the only good hospitals in Ireland were in Dublin and Belfast, so if you could afford to go there, you went there. I was born in Belfast.
And for fun, in the ‘40s in Ireland? Well if you wanted to go for a Sunday afternoon drive, you had to go by pony and trap.
Did the pony have a name? Yes, the pony’s name was Blinker. He used to sit out in his field, back on his haunches, a bit like a dog, and look out at the view — and it was a very lovely view.
And growing up, did you stay in Donegal? Well the schools were dreadful. They were state schools and Catholic schools. So the only way to get me educated properly was to send me to a boarding school in Dublin. I went there when I was 8.
Was that common practice? In those days, yes. I stayed away for three months at a time without going home.
So you were better at living away from home than most of us who went away for university! I hated it. I got dreadfully homesick, especially when I was small. And then I went to a private secondary school, a “public” school in Ireland, from the time I was 13 until I was almost 18. Then we left Ireland and moved to Canada.
Arrival in Canada
Where did you land in Canada? Well we took the ship across, because in those days that’s how you did it. We left Liverpool in a howling storm in October. I got quite seasick. And we arrived in Montreal. Actually, I caught my first glimpse of Canada on my 18th birthday, coming through the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Lab- rador.
And was that where your family settled? We took the train across the country from Montreal to Vancouver – about four days’ journey. My father’s diary for the first two days just said, ‘trees, trees, trees’, because going through northern Ontario all you saw were trees – there was nothing else to see. We arrived in Vancouver. We had no money at all. My father and I got jobs and my siblings came out at Christmastime. We rented a house in Port Moody just outside Vancouver.
What was life like in Port Moody then? We had so little money, but I was young and I had no worries. I imagine my mother and father were sick with worry, because it was the days before we had health insurance; if anyone got sick I don’t know how we would have coped but nobody got sick – we managed it. I managed to save enough to go to university: $600.00 was enough for fees, books and board then, and after my first year I got scholarships.
Where did you go to university and what did you study? I went to UBC. I started in commerce, and I couldn’t stand it. And the only way out of it without going backwards was going into law. In those days, before the LSAT and so on, if you could sign your name I think you pretty well got in, but back then law schools weeded out about a third of the class by Christmas. But I did fairly well, and at the end of my third year I got a Commonwealth Scholarship and went to Pembroke College, Oxford. I was there for two years. It was wonderful; the scholarship paid for everything – you had an allowance for books, fees, and lodging. It was very generous.
So why did you come back to Canada, if Oxford was so kind? Well, I had written to the dean of the law school at UBC, essentially asking: “Do you want to give me a job?” He never bothered to reply, but out of the blue came a job offer from the dean of the law school at U of T. At the time, every graduate student was dealing with international law. I didn’t want to do that. I said I wanted to do the common law, and the dean, Cecil (Caesar) Wright — he graduated from Osgoode in 1926; you can see his picture in the Graduating Class — was Canada’s preeminent authority on torts and having someone who wanted to work on the common law was what he wanted, so he gave me a job on that basis. That brought me to U of T in 1965, and that’s when I started to teach. I was only three years older than the students I was teaching. Your first years of teaching are terrifying! Even now, I get nervous before every class, but I think you always have to feel like that. The same way that if you aren’t nervous before going to court, well, you should be. It means you take it seriously.
And when did you start teaching contracts? Not until 1972. I soon learned I could not teach using someone else’s materials, and it’s been 40 years since the first edition of my text came out.
Conflicts and Questions
After teaching contracts for 12 years, she wanted to see if her ideas for contracts would actually work in practice. The opportunity to do so came from none other than one of the many students she had taught. In March of 1987, a friend – a former student who was actually working at Aird & Berlis – wanted my advice on something. I met him for lunch, and told him I was unhappy. Just as I was walking back into my office after the meal, the phone rang. It was my friend on the line. He told me to send my CV down to the firm’s senior partner, so I did. After a month or so, I was invited to meet the management committee for lunch; they offered me a job, and the rest is history. My friend died of cancer not long ago.
Were you content to have left academia? At the end of my first year with Aird & Berlis, I asked the university if I could stay away another year. I was told that I could, if I promised to come back.
Did you take their offer? I’ve made the serious decisions in my life by asking myself, “How will I feel, say, five years from now if I make this choice, rather than that choice?” I realized that if I left the firm and went back to academia so soon, I would regret it forever. I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but I knew that two years didn’t give me enough time to see if my ideas worked. And so I stayed, and I became a partner two years after I joined the firm.
Transition and Transparency
As an introduction during her first class of the year, Professor Swan makes a point of announcing that her earlier work was published under the name John Swan.
When did you decide to fully transition? When my wife died, I figured well, why am I waiting? I’ve wanted this all my life.
When did you first know? I’ve known since I was six.
How did you choose the name Angela? Well I would have preferred other names, but they were all taken by members of my family! I love Catherine, Jennifer. But Angela’s alright.
Why do you tell us right off the bat? The reason it’s one of the first things I say to you is that it seems to be so much easier to get it out; there are no misunderstandings. Last year, one person wasn’t in the room when I did that, so it took her a while to figure out what the hell was going on!
And has the rest of the community been accepting? Yes, entirely accepting.
Were you worried ever? No. Not at all.
On Teaching Us
Professor Swan joined the Faculty of Law at Osgoode an adjunct professor in 2003 after spending six years at McGill.
Do you have any plans to stop teaching? As long as I can do it and believe I can do it well, I’ll keep doing it. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but when I tell my students that I never leave a class without knowing more than I did when I went in, I mean it. Like today, thanks to a question brought up in class, I suddenly saw something I had never thought of, some particular connection or point of view. The excitement for me of teaching and writing is that I keep changing my mind in the sense that I see things more clearly. I am not unhappy with what I wrote even 30 years ago; I just see things more clearly now. Teaching, for me, is this wonderful stimulus, because as I’m talking in class I say, “Hmm, that’s not quite right”. And so I go back and figure out what is right.
Do you have an example of a moment like that? When I first started teaching, my principal course was ‘Conflicts’: an absolutely crazy course. It really is. As an intellectual construct, it’s a complete monster. It’s like some kind of Heath Robinson monster that’s hung together with bailing twine and old bolts. On one Tuesday, a student asked me in class: “How do you choose the law to govern a tort that occurs in one country when the parties live in another?” I said to the students that I would get back to them on Thursday. I didn’t sleep from that class to the next class; I had to work this thing out. The con- clusion I came to was that you simply apply the law of your own court, because you have no reason not to. It was like a light suddenly going on. The whole thing came from a student’s question. If I hadn’t had that student’s question, would I have got the same response? Would I have had the same kind of learn- ing opportunity that that question offered me? That’s why I love teaching.
Is there something special about teaching first years? If you teach undergraduates, you can regard the students coming in one end and going out the other – a bit like a tunnel. But with law students, when they finish law school, they will come and join me in the profession! There are people at the firm who were my students, and I like that. There are several partners and associates, an articling student, and a summer student coming back next year who were my students, so I have the joy of seeing people that I taught become my colleagues. And that is an intense joy, because I’ve seen you grow and develop. I’ve seen you become the person you are.
And do you have any counsel for those of us just beginning our journeys? The quality of student has dramatically increased. No student who gets into law school now should not also expect to get out. There are no people at the bottom of the class. Everyone should be able to get a job; the problems are not the students and their abilities.
Is there anything that you would want to tell the students at Osgoode, for those who may not ever get to sit in your classroom? I’d say: take as many courses as you possibly can. This is the only time in your life that you will get a chance to learn this much law. Be careful with taking intensives and be careful with taking various litigation things, because yes, you might enjoy that but be careful, because you’re going to need to learn an awful lot of law. And besides that, have fun. You’re all so smart, and you will learn so much, so make sure you enjoy it.
Angela Swan is a solicitor at Aird & Berlis LLP, and an adjunct professor at Osgoode, teaching first year Contracts and occasionally, Contracts II, an upper year course, subtitled, “Contracts for Solicitors”. Her students are scattered everywhere from the Supreme Court of Canada to her own firm, and her course has been nicknamed “Swantracts” as a testament to her tenure and expertise. As an authority on the matter, she may have discovered the key to a long life; she starts every day with 100 ml of kefir, 80 g of blueberries, 50 ml of 2% milk, 8 g of ground flaxseed, 6 g of hemp hearts and all bran, 4 g of psyllium husk, and 3 g of cocoa. She is besotted with her 14 grandchildren, has befriended everyone on the 7:00 a.m. 143 Beach Express bus to downtown, and sometimes walks in the Pride Parade with the Bar Association.