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Of all members of society, lawyers have a particular duty to uphold the rule of law. Yet recently, in a controversy involving language, hundreds of Quebec lawyers took the position that the law of the land, in the form of the Canadian Constitution, should be ignored.

The controversy arose from a lawsuit filed in April by the provincial and Montreal bar associations. The aim of the lawsuit is to eliminate confusion arising from differences between the French and English versions of Quebec legal texts, which have equal weight.

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The two professional associations have asked Quebec Superior Court to invalidate the province’s existing laws and regulations unless the National Assembly complies with a constitutional requirement that the two versions be identical.

This provoked an uproar among the associations’ members and in the media. A request signed by 118 of the Quebec bar’s nearly 27,000 lawyers forced the association to hold a special meeting on resolutions opposing the lawsuit. The meeting, held last week in Montreal, was attended by about 740 members.