Bertha Wilson

Bertha Wernham Wilson, who lived from September 18, 1923, to April 28, 2007, was a Scottish-born Canadian jurist who became the first woman appointed a puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, named to the court by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in March 1982. She had already broken ground earlier in her career, becoming the first woman made an associate and later a partner at the law firm Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt, where she also established the first in-house legal research department in the Canadian legal industry, and in 1975 she became the first woman appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario. On the Supreme Court she wrote influential opinions on constitutional matters including abortion law and the availability of self-defense in cases of domestic violence, helping shape the early interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. After retiring from the bench in 1991 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and, in 1992, a Companion of the Order of Canada.