THE ADVOCATE 921
VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
NEW JUDGES
By R.C. Tino Bella
The Honourable Justice Lauren Blake
Lauren Blake comes well equipped for judging. The
Blake family is endowed with serious brainpower. Her
father Ian is a distinguished professor of electrical
engineering and a mathematician. One of his books is
An Introduction to Applied Probability. He must have
known his daughter would one day be balancing probabilities
on a daily basis. Elizabeth, her mother, was a
computer scientist in the 1960s, working for the jet
propulsion lab in Pasadena, California, and again in the 1980s working with
the project team at the University of Waterloo that developed software to
computerize the Oxford English Dictionary. That project ultimately led to the
establishment of Open Text Corporation. Her brother Michael is Professor of
Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance at the University of Washington.
Lauren was born and raised in Waterloo, Ontario. Thanks to her father
spending his sabbaticals pursuing his academic interests, she spent her
grade 1 year in Yorktown Heights, New York, when her father spent time at
the IBM Research Center. Grade 10 was in La Jolla, California, where her
father worked at M/A-COM Linkabit, and as a 13-year-old she spent the
summer in Switzerland while her father was working at the IBM Zurich
Research Lab in Rüschlikon.
Lauren was active in student affairs: she was elected to the student council
both in high school and at the University of Toronto. She worked as a tour
guide, a waitress, a human resources assistant and in a legal aid clinic during
her time as an undergraduate. She graduated with an honours history
degree from the University of Toronto in 1991 and completed her law
degree at UBC in 1994, having started out at UVic.
After graduating, Lauren spent a year as a law clerk at the B.C. Supreme
Court and then completed her articles at Davis & Company (now DLA Piper