Mr. Speaker, Allan Leal, who died in Toronto on October 12, 1999, had a distinguished career as a legal educator and civil servant. He had been named as a Rhodes scholar but because of military service never took up the appointment. He took his legal education at the Osgoode Hall Law School after the war, with a later degree from Harvard Law School. He was then Dean of Osgoode Hall and subsequently Chair of the Ontario Law Reform Commission and Deputy Attorney General of Ontario.
His deanship at Osgoode Hall came during the public controversy over the role of the legal profession in legal education. As the dispute came to a head, he proposed a union of the Osgoode Hall and University of Toronto law schools.
This was not to be. Instead, there emerged two separate university law schools with their own distinctive personalities and philosophies of legal education. The intellectual legal differences between the two schools have done much to shape Canadian jurisprudence today.