She's charismatic Rosie to the world. She can work a room like a penny-stock promoter, charm a crowd in a football stadium. She radiates sunshine. She hugs, she bubbles, she laughs, she incandescently smiles.
She's a darling of the Toronto arts world, an it-guest at every haut-monde Toronto party. National Arts Centre head Peter Herrndorf calls her "incredibly cuddly." Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan says she's "the most wonderful person I've ever known in my whole life."
She has spent an adult lifetime -- at age 29, she was the youngest (and first pregnant) Canadian ever made a judge -- heightening her fellow citizens' awareness of family law, labour law, equity law, human rights and the political nature of the world they live in.
She's dynamite on a speaker's platform, exquisite with a pen. Amid a shower of awards and tributes bestowed on her, she holds 18 honorary doctorates.
And, as of yesterday, Madam Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, born in a displaced persons camp in Germany 58 years ago, was formally on her way to the Supreme Court of Canada. A job she has long wanted -- at times, it has been said by her critics, too publicly -- and now she has arrived.
Behind the veil of the sparkling social Rosie is a woman whose career path has been spectacular.
Judge Abella came to Canada with her Holocaust-survivor parents at the age of 4. She graduated from the University of Toronto law school in 1970 and practised civil and criminal litigation until 1976 when, seven months pregnant, she was made a judge of the Ontario Family Court.
Concurrent with the 11 years she sat on the family bench, she was a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the Ontario Public Service Labour Relations Tribunal, the Ontario Premier's Advisory Committee on Confederation, chairwoman of a provincial study on access to legal services by the disabled, chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and head of a federal royal commission on equality in employment.
Her royal commission report introduced Canadians and their governments to the concept of employment equity -- a strategy for reducing employment barriers for women, aboriginals, visible minorities and persons with disabilities -- that was subsequently copied by the governments of New Zealand, Northern Ireland and South Africa.
After leaving the family court in 1987, she taught constitutional, administrative and civil rights law for four years at McGill University (as well as lecturing at the University of Toronto), chaired the Ontario Law Reform Commission, moderated the televised political leaders' debate in the 1988 federal election and was a co-chair of the 1992 citizens constitutional conferences held across the country.
In 1992, she was appointed to the bench of the Ontario Court of Appeal. She has authored or co-authored four books and written more than 70 professional articles. She's an accomplished classical pianist. She was recently a judge of the Giller Literary Prize, Canada's richest writers award. She is married to historian Irving Abella and is the mother of two sons, Jacob and Zachary, both lawyers.
Judge Abella is not without critics, who have disliked her ambition and seen her jurisprudence as less than stellar.
One Toronto trial lawyer, speaking on condition of anonymity, referred to her yesterday as "a well-loved politician with no memorable judgments who makes a great after-dinner speech."
But that is not a consensus judgment. And there is much agreement within the legal community on two issues:
Judge Abella is expected to be a superb judicial communicator on a court whose decisions are increasingly important in the lives of all Canadians. And she is expected to bring to the top court an unassailable and much needed expertise and vision on equality law, an area in which the court has been judged variously to be either imprecise and unpredictable or just plain bad.