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*. The author is grateful for the assistance of research assistants Myla Picco and Victor Wong, and for the assistance of Dan Edelstein (Academic Director, Windsor Research Data Centre).
The importance of diversity is routinely proclaimed by leaders of the legal profession.1Socio-legal scholars, testing these proclamations against reality, have evaluated the diversity of large corporate law firms, law schools, and the judiciary.2However, similarly thorough study has not yet been made of diversity within the leadership of law societies and bar associations.3These organizations are of central importance in North America's distinctive self-regulatory approach to legal services regulation.4In addition to long-standing authority over who can be a lawyer, and over what lawyers must and must not do, lawyers' self-regulatory organizations increasingly bear responsibility for access to justice and for reconciling professionalism values with marketplace values.5
When lawyers vote to elect the leaders of these self-regulatory organizations, what sort of people do they vote for? How representative of Ontario's diversity are the Law Society benchers? How does the selection process affect the diversity of self-regulatory leaders and other elite lawyer sub-groups? To respond to these queries, this article quantitatively assesses the demographic and professional diversity of leadership in Ontario's legal services self-regulator, the Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC). Candidate campaign materials and voting pattern data from the five LSUC bencher elections since 1999 provide the data for the analysis.6
The results suggest that those who currently lead the Law Society (known as benchers) are not disproportionately "male and pale." Non-white members and women were elected in numbers proportionate to their shares of Ontario lawyers in the 2015 election. Regression analysis suggests that being non-white is not a disadvantage in these elections.7Being a woman actually seems to confer a surprisingly significant advantage.8This contrasts with the diversity situation in other elite subgroups of Canadian lawyers, especially the judiciary. The diverse employment contexts of the province's lawyers were also fairly well represented in the 2015 class of benchers.9However one constituency--early-career lawyers--was completely unrepresented in the Law Society's elected leadership.10
This article begins by reviewing the literature on diversity, or lack thereof, in the legal profession and its regulatory leadership (Part I). The...