Crusading lawyer Alan Young fought to lift restrictions on sex work, gambling and pot

It was 1966 and the Beatles were due to visit Toronto as part of their North American tour. Ten-year-old Alan Young and his older sister pleaded with their parents to attend a concert. They said no, worried about the pandemonium prompted by the Fab Four wherever they performed.

The next year, a more conventional British pop group, Herman’s Hermits, came to town and Alan’s parents relented. At the show, what really struck the pre-teen was the opening act, the Who, who finished their set by destroying their instruments.

“I was gravitating toward what they were doing and said to myself, ‘there’s a lot of creative energy in destruction,’” Mr. Young, who went on to become a crusading constitutional lawyer, told Steve Paikin on TVO in 2018. “I think that’s what propelled me into that path, that destroying things would lead to a better future.”

Mr. Young, who died at age 69 on Dec. 7 from cancer, embraced the idea of creative destruction throughout his career as an outspoken professor of criminal and constitutional law at Osgoode Hall Law School and in a private practice where he fought for years to lift Canada’s legal restrictions on prostitution, gambling and cannabis.

He successfully challenged Canada’s prostitution laws before the Supreme Court of Canada in 2013, forcing a revamped approach, and convinced the courts to widen access to medical marijuana, leading the way to eventual legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes under the Trudeau government.

“I demolish bad laws,” he told an interviewer in 2010.

“He was a nihilist from an early age and an atheist,” his wife, Laura Young (née Sokoloski), said in an interview. “He loved to shock.” But he believed strongly that people should “not be prosecuted for their vices or harming themselves.”

An associate professor at Osgoode for 31 years, Mr. Young inspired generations of budding lawyers with his presence and his often entertaining lectures. For one class, he brought in a Breathalyzer and tested it to see how much alcohol it would take to set it off.

“He was a very talented speaker and very dynamic which made his classes just incredible,” said Marie Henein, the Toronto criminal lawyer, who was Mr. Young’s student and later taught with him. “He was not traditional and I loved that.”

“He was not your regular buttoned-up lawyer,” she continued, but nevertheless was extremely knowledgeable of the law. “When he would argue in the Court of Appeal, he was quite stunning in his advocacy.”

“He was a character, he was always someone with a twinkle in his eye,” said Trevor Farrow, Osgoode Hall’s Dean. “The students loved him because he was energetic and he liked to involve students in doing real stuff. … People were drawn to him.”

“He was an amazing mentor,” said Adam Parachin, a fellow professor at Osgoode Hall, who first encountered Mr. Young in 1997 as a first-year law student. “I never met anyone like him before or after. He was an intellectual force. A lot of people can lecture, but not everyone can bring to the tedium of law [both] charisma and wit. That’s a real skill.”

“Alan helped a lot of people and he seemed to have a particular heart for the underdog,” Mr. Parachin said, pointing to his work at Osgoode Hall’s Innocence Project, which took cases on behalf of the wrongfully convicted.

Alan Young was born in Toronto on Dec. 1, 1956, the second child of Sam Young, a developer of strip malls, and his wife, Shirley Young (née Rosen). Mr. Young attended local Jewish and public schools. At York Mills Collegiate, he found his studies easy but was already up to mischief.

He wanted to become a writer but ceded to parental pressure and ended up in law school, graduating from Osgoode Hall in 1981. He clerked for Bora Laskin, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, and later earned a Master of Laws degree from Harvard. He began teaching at Osgoode in 1986.

While teaching fulltime, Mr. Young also maintained a private legal practice, taking on constitutional challenges on behalf of often unpopular causes, including gambling, cannabis consumption and prostitution. Most of the time, he worked pro bono, or for low fees.

In the early 1990s, cannabis activist and entrepreneur Marc Emery owned the City Lights bookshop in London, Ont., when he decided to challenge Canada’s obscenity laws. As Nasty as They Wanna Be, an album from 2 Live Crew, had been banned in Ontario because of its explicit lyrics so Mr. Emery drove to Detroit and brought back 100 copies for sale at his store.

A crowd turned up and a policeman was second in line to buy a copy. Mr. Emery was charged with obscenity. Mr. Young defended the case but lost. Later, Mr. Emery later challenged Ontario’s Sunday shopping laws and once again, Mr. Young lost the case.

But in a third case, Mr. Young prevailed. Mr. Emery and others had been selling how-to books on growing marijuana and a pot publication called High Times, in contravention of a provision of the Criminal Code. In 1994, an Ontario judge struck down the provision on free-speech grounds in a related case, the first of a series of cases that lifted the ban on publications promoting marijuana, allowed farmers to cultivate industrial hemp, and most importantly allowed patients increasingly broad access to medical marijuana for pain relief.

“On stage or in a courtroom, he [Mr. Young] was so good,” Mr. Emery said in an interview. “I would gladly hire him for anything from defending a traffic ticket to the Supreme Court.”

Even though the challenges of the obscenity law and of Sunday shopping failed in court, Mr. Emery said he knows of no similar obscenity cases that were ever prosecuted again, and Ontario soon dropped its ban on Sunday shopping, so he feels he won in the end.

It took more than 20 years for cannabis to be fully legalized by the Trudeau government and available for recreational use. But in the end, Mr. Young wasn’t satisfied with the outcome, arguing that the decision was not made on principle, like the decriminalization of abortion.

Instead, Mr. Young believed that the federal government had decided it wanted to compete with the black market for cannabis with the help of big business. “That’s when I knew it was going to happen because now it was about the corporate world and about making money in tax dollars.”

Mr. Young openly talked about his own drug use. He said he dabbled with psychedelic drugs in his youth though he said he always “under-dosed” when he took them. “I tried everything once but the only thing I stuck with was cannabis because I do think it’s a wonderful plant that brings a lot of benefit to the world,” he told TVO in 2018.

Mr. Young’s greatest court victory came in 2013, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country’s prostitution laws after a five-year court battle led by Mr. Young on behalf of Terri-Jean Bedford, a dominatrix, and two fellow sex workers.

He argued that the laws, which banned bawdy houses and living off the avails of prostitution, forced sex workers unto the streets where they were subject to increased danger, breaching the workers’ charter rights.

“Canadian society will not collapse or even flinch under the weight of this decision,” Mr. Young said when the case was earlier affirmed by the Ontario Court of Appeal, noting that 80 per cent of sex work had already migrated indoors from the street.

Yet the 2013 victory was only partial. The Harper government responded with legislation that allowed for the sale of sex but made its purchase illegal, putting the criminal onus on johns. That law is still being contested in the courts.

Mr. Young’s provocative approach didn’t make him universally liked. “In faculty council meetings, if he didn’t agree with someone, he would tell them, and the same in the classroom,” said Mr. Farrow, the Osgoode Hall dean. “He could piss people off.”

His wife added that among his colleagues, “They loved him or they hated him.”

Mr. Young was no friend of the legal profession. His 2003 memoir, Justice Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers and Lawyers, was an attack on the justice system and on lawyers themselves.

“We should be protecting the potheads and perverts so that we can prevent serious crimes, and lawyers stand in the way of that,” Mr. Young complained during a launch event for the book.

He also decried the hypocrisy of his profession. “I smoked pot with judges,” he admitted. “I smoked joints with prosecutors. How can they get up in the morning and look in the mirror when they know they are going to ruin someone’s life for that very thing. I know judges that go to prostitutes and I know judges that go to dominatrixes.”

After retiring in 2018, Mr. Young fulfilled a long-held dream and wrote two plays, one of which was performed just once. That lack of acceptance was a disappointment, according to his wife.

Mr. Young leaves his wife, Laura, from whom he was separated; and a son, Justin. His first marriage ended in divorce. He was predeceased by his parents and sister, Jill.

While Mr. Young was often seen as a showman and provocateur, he was also a legal scholar with a well-defined philosophy on why governments should step away from regulating traditional vices. “I happen to think that people should be allowed to make their own heaven and hell,” he once said.

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