With apologies for cross-posting, I write to share the news of the passing last month of Jacob Ziegel, who taught law for over four decades in Canada. He was a leading voice in Canadian consumer and commercial law, and was also a key organizer of outstanding academic events in private law more generally.

 

Also for over four decades, Jacob was the convenor of the Annual Workshop of Commercial and Consumer Law, which was the only annually recurring event in Canada that was preoccupied not only with commercial and consumer law (including their public law aspects), but with private law more generally. I attended at least a dozen of these excellent events, which were usually held at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, but also occasionally elsewhere. In my case, I was usually presenting on aspects of restitution, trust law, and comparative law that related only indirectly to commercial and consumer law, and I was thrilled to have a group of interested interlocutors. Jacob’s expertise as an organizer, combined with the generous support of his Faculty and of Toronto law firms, meant that the event was well-funded and well-organized. I still remember my astonishment, as a just-beginning professor in the early 1990’s, when I learned that the conference would help to fund my travel costs even if I was not giving a paper. Jacob knew the importance of this in a jurisdiction like Canada, when faculties did not necessarily offer travel funding; my then employer, the University of Alberta, is 3,000 km from Toronto. Perhaps like many others of my vintage who were also on a budget, I quickly got to know the Holiday Inn and the other inexpensive hotels around the Toronto faculty. Jacob always made a point of having a high-profile international speaker; I recall, for example, Sir Roy Goode and Andrew (now Lord) Burrows. And Jacob was also very careful to try to ensure that the voice of Canadian civil law was represented at the Workshop. For those of my “generation”—and perhaps one or two before and after—the Workshop provided an invaluable setting in which to meet and get to know colleagues from across the country—academics, practitioners, and judges—with shared interests. Certainly in the days before zoom, there were not many opportunities for this in Canada, and none was as regular as the Workshop. It was a very important of my development as a scholar, and I think the same is true of many others.

 

Through the Workshop and through his own scholarship, I got to know Jacob’s deep concern for consumers and the protection of their interests. Another recollection (my memory may be playing tricks on me) was learning from a short note by Jacob in the Canadian Business Law Journal of his dissatisfaction that the Ontario legislature had abolished the rule, inherited from the Statute of Frauds of 1677 but with some adjustment of the monetary threshold, that contracts for the sale of goods above a certain value needed to be evidenced in writing to be enforceable. He thought it protected consumers, and should not have been abrogated without proper consideration of this function. He was also a leading commentator in many fields outside of consumer law, including insolvency and perhaps especially lending secured on personal property.

 

I knew Jacob for a long time, but I did not know him as well as some list members may have. From the obituary that was published in the Globe and Mail, I learned that Jacob was born in Germany and left that country before the war on a Kindertransport, and that his parents died in the Holocaust. Before his many years at the Law Faculty of the University of Toronto, he taught also at the University of Saskatchewan, McGill University and Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. For decades, Jacob was not only the guiding spirit of the Annual Workshop of Commercial and Consumer Law, but also of the Canadian Business Law Journal. The Journal continues to be an outlet for scholarship in business law and in all areas of private law.

 

May he rest in peace, and may we keep his memory alive in our hearts.

 

Lionel