THE ADVOCATE 919
VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
by Leslie’s literary mind, by her poetry and metaphors, she illuminated the
wrongs and showed a path for the law to intervene to correct the transgressions
of the past. This was Leslie’s creative genius in the courtroom.
Leslie’s interest in metaphor extended well beyond the courtroom to the
heat of the bullring, the passion of the opera, the archetypes of the stage
and an extensive collection of wide-brimmed hats. Leslie blasted through
her life, a truth seeker and truth teller with a fierce sense of justice and a
raw willingness to embrace everything. She journeyed assiduously to find
her great love, Catherine. Leslie did not shy away from a challenge. She welcomed
the coming-into-play of the spiritual, the magical, the mysterious.
Nature whispered to her one day when she was visiting Hardy Island, and
she wanted to listen. She built her house, off the grid where the forces of
nature required her to learn how to capture the sun and rain, how to captain
a boat, how to rise above isolation.
When Leslie was eight years old, her 36-year-old father died suddenly
from a massive heart attack. Leslie described the experience of his death as
an “inexplicable, catastrophic earthquake which disappears your love.”
From the fire of this defining event in her young life, Leslie found the words
to describe our great loss at her sudden passing.
By Clarine Ostrove and Louise Mandell, Q.C.
ENDNOTE
1. Selected Publications: Under the House (Random
House, 1987); On Double Tracks (Bloomsbury Publishing
PLC, 1990); Bring Me One of Everything
(Grey Swan Press, 2012); The Indulgence (Tellwell
Talent, 2019); The Carriers of No: After the Land
Claims Trial (Lazara Press, 1991); “To the Fourth
Wall” in Max Wyman, ed, Vancouver Forum I: Old
Powers, New Forces (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992); 35
Stones (Lazara Press, 1982); “Bring Me One of
Everything: Selected Writings of Leslie Hall Pinder”
(2007) 31 Legal Studies Forum 1033.