Dianne Louise Pothier
Legal scholar. Karaoke magician. Craft aficionado. Ocean swimmer. Born March 11, 1954, in Halifax; died Jan. 3, 2017, in Halifax, unexpectedly; aged 62.
Some people win you over by sheer force of personality. Dianne did it with her brain.
She loved detail and could commit vast amounts of material to memory. Dianne was a student and later faculty member at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. If you were in her constitutional, labour or public law class she would drown you in substance. She did not suffer reductionism. Complex legal doctrine stayed that way.
She was brilliant. When she graduated from law school in 1982 she took close to every academic prize, including the University Medal in Law, awarded for best overall performance.
Dianne was a proud Acadian and injustice infuriated her. She could hold a grudge for centuries. When those of us who worked with her at the law school tried to convince her to let us nominate for her for Queen's Counsel, a designation awarded to lawyers who demonstrate merit, she declined. "As someone who sits through, and refuses to sing, God Save The Queen, the thought of being a Queen's Counsel leaves me cold," she wrote in an e-mail, adding: "My ancestors were deported in the name of the British crown, and I have not forgiven that. So all in all, no thanks."
We thought Dianne should have been appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada but we could not persuade her to apply. Serving on the Supreme Court would at best be a distraction from the projects that mattered. And what mattered to Dianne was defending Bill C-14, which allows for physician-assisted death, especially its limitation to those whose death is reasonably foreseeable.
She cared about discrimination and was prepared to support interventions at the Supreme Court in the latest round of disputes about Trinity Western's exclusionary policies toward queer students. Additionally, at the time of her death she was working on a human-rights complaint about the lack of supportive housing for disabled persons.
Dianne's final excuse for not applying to the Supreme Court was to ask, with her usual wit, "Would being a SCC judge require an end to my karaoke career?"
She was a beautiful singer. In a pub she could silence the clatter of beer glasses as she let down her long, white hair and offered a chilling rendition of White Rabbit.
Dianne loved Halifax. She spent a brief period in Ottawa early in her education and career, but the Atlantic Ocean, her family and friends kept her firmly rooted. It's also possible, given her Acadian roots, that she could not surrender the place.
At a memorial in Dianne's honour, Catherine Frazee, professor emerita in disability studies at Ryerson University said, "Dianne taught us that we do not have to be brilliant, as she was, to be equal. That we do not have to be formidable, as Dianne was, to be equal. That we do not have to be fearless, as Dianne was, to be equal. That we can be ordinary people, real people – broken, timid, vulnerable, weak, full of compromise and contradiction – and yet, still we are equal."
Dianne deeply affected those of us who came to love her – her colleagues, students, family, and members of her many equality and church communities. Perhaps one of her great strengths was that she didn't come at you with force of personality. She wedged her way slowly under your skin, and now that she's gone we're just starting to realize how deeply she had become part of us.
Kim Brooks is Dianne's colleague and friend.
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