York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School presented its highest award – the Award of Excellence – to three distinguished alumni at a gala dinner last night in Toronto.
The recipients of the Robinette Medal Award of Excellence (pictured left) for outstanding contribution to the legal profession are criminal lawyer Austin M. Cooper, judge Hilda M. McKinlay and tax lawyer Arthur R.A. Scace.
Cooper (left) has been a defence counsel in criminal law since 1953, when he graduated from Osgoode. A Queen’s counsel, he has written and lectured widely on advocacy, evidence and substantive criminal law. The 1992 recipient of the Douglas K. Laidlaw Medal for Excellence in Advocacy, Cooper is a founding member of the Advocates Society in Ontario, former Chair of the civil liberties subsection of the Canadian Bar Association, and has served as a bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
McKinlay (right) is a member of ADR Chambers, a Toronto-based alternative dispute resolution group. After graduating from Osgoode in 1966 and articling, she taught law until 1973, then practised commercial law, primarily banking, bankruptcy and receivership matters. In 1983, she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Ontario and four years later to the Ontario Court of Appeal. She retired in 1999.
Scace (left) has been with McCarthy Tétrault LLP, the largest law firm in Canada, for 33 years and is a partner in the tax law section in the Toronto office. A Queen’s counsel, he is the co-author of The Income Tax Law of Canada, and has been a lecturer at Osgoode and University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law and a bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
The Robinette Medal is named after the late John J. Robinette Q.C. ''29 who received the first Award of Excellence in 1983.
For more information, see the Media Relations Web site at www.yorku.ca/ycom/release/archive/021703-2.htm.