Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m M A r C h 2 0 1 5 11 L inda Taylor says if she hadn't been working very late on a bitter Calgary winter's night in 1999 waiting for a legal brief to be printed, she wouldn't have been leafing through The Economist to kill time. In the magazine, she spotted an interesting job advertisement. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was looking for a lawyer in Gaza. "I didn't know anything about Gaza," she says. "I just knew it was on the Mediterra- nean and it was warm. So I applied." Taylor was in the middle of a successful career. In 1979, she had been among the first graduates from the University of Calgary's new law school. She wanted to be a politician and felt law was an ideal launching pad. But then in a first-year constitu- tional law class she did a moot "and I fell in love with advocacy and that was the end of my political ambitions." Soon after, she took a graduate degree in law at Cambridge University. "I wanted to see how my law degree from this brand new [law] school held up." She remembers her time at Cambridge as "magical, inspiring, challenging" and her U of C law degree "held me in good stead." She returned to Calgary, took a job with what was then Code Hunter Wittmann and in time became a partner. She was a top litigator and became involved as an intervener in two landmark Supreme Court cases (R. v. Keegstra and R. v. Butler), worked on the 1987 Code Inquiry, and the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Taylor says her legal career was "very interesting, engaging, and challenging. I took my career very seriously." But on that winter's night in 1999 as she looked at the ad, she remembers, "I was ready for a change, I wanted an adventure." Given her background she won the job. She took a leave of absence from her law firm and headed for Gaza, quickly becoming engaged in the UN's legal work. After 18 months, her UN assignment ended and she returned to Calgary and her law firm. "But I realized I wanted to work for the United Nations" and when a UN job offer came up in Geneva she took it and resigned from her firm. She was in Geneva until 2007 and then moved to UN headquarters in New York City. Her career flourished in New York as she took on increasingly chal- lenging assignments. She accompanied UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to Baghdad as well as other locations around the world. In 2012, she was appointed as executive director of the UN's Office of Administration of Justice, essentially the UN's internal justice system. "My job is to co-ordinate it," says Taylor. Some 74,000 United Nations' staff around the world have access to the system. Because they work for the UN, if they want to challenge an administrative decision they cannot take their grievance to a national court. The matter has to be settled internally. So the United Nations offers legal advice and coun- selling to its workers, if matters cannot be resolved there, they go to a dispute tribunal and, if necessary, ultimately to an appeal tribunal. The tribunals are staffed by judges from jurisdictions around the world and are decentralized, with sittings in New York as well as Geneva and Nairobi. The litigation relies on a case history developed by the tribunals and their predecessors. "Overall," says Taylor "the system is working well." As for the future Taylor admits "there are times I miss being in the courtroom, but I've had my share of adrenalin rushes in the UN." However, "at some point I want to come home, to Canada. The more I am away, the more I appreciate it. There are a lot of problems [in the world] we don't have." Taylor has no regrets about leaving her career in Calgary and feels fortunate she can contribute to the United Nations. "I believe in what the UN does and I am very happy to be a small part of it." — Geoff ellwand writerlaw@gmail.com How the cold, The Economist, and the Gaza Strip changed a lawyer's life W E s t \ At L A N t I C \ C E N t r A L \ W E s t rEgIoNAL WrAp-up eneinHutchison-2_CL_Mar_15.indd 1 2015-02-09 9:58 AM

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