Antonio Lamer, CC, Canadian Chief Justice, 1990-2000, was born on July 8, 1933. He died of heart disease on November 24, 2007, aged 74

For 20 years Antonio Lamer wore the red, ermine-trimmed robes of a justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, one of nine men charged with the task of serving as that country's court of final appeal. He and his colleagues considered more than 1,300 matters in that time, their decisions fundamentally altering the Canadian legal landscape.

Joseph Antonio Charles Lamer was admitted to the Bar in 1957 after graduating from the University of Montreal.He founded the Quebec Defence Attorneys' Association. His first high-

profile case came in 1968 when he successfully defended Pierre Bourgault, an early proponent of Quebec independence, on charges of inciting the riot that marred that year's St Jean Baptiste celebrations. A year later Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau named Lamer a judge of the Quebec Superior Court.

In 1978 he was elevated to the Quebec Court of Appeals and in 1980 was named to the Supreme Court where his libertarian outlook dovetailed conveniently with the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Lamer wrote majority decisions in almost 350 of those cases.

Named Chief Justice in 1990, Lamer proved to be a skilled and efficient administrator. Lamer's rulings included several favourable to native land claims. He considered the most important ruling of his career was the unanimous 1998 opinion that Quebec did not have the unilateral right to secede from Canada, but if the separatist option ever won a clear majority in a fairly conducted referendum, the federal government was obliged to negotiate terms.

Lamer left the Supreme Court in 2000 and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada (CC) the following year.