Claire L'Heureux-Dube

Claire L'Heureux-Dube sat on the Supreme Court of Canada from April 1987 to July 2002, the second woman appointed to the court after Bertha Wilson and the first from Quebec. She had already been the first woman appointed to the Quebec Superior Court in 1973 and the first woman on the Quebec Court of Appeal in 1979, and on the Supreme Court she became known as its great dissenter, with roughly forty percent of her 254 judgments recorded as dissents, arguing consistently for the rights of women, immigrants and other marginalized groups. Before her judicial career she was among the first female lawyers in Quebec to handle divorce cases and co-authored the 1981 book Family Law: Dimensions of Justice with future colleague Rosalie Abella.