On Monday, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear a case that will determine who gets to regulate a lawyer’s courtroom behaviour, which has important implications for our justice system.

At the centre of the storm is a Toronto litigator named Joe Groia, who has been convicted of being “rude” — that is, in engaging in uncivil courtroom conduct — by the Law Society, the body that regulates Ontario lawyers. As a result of his conviction, Joe has been sentenced to a one month suspension and a fine of $200,000, which he will only have to serve and pay if he loses at the Supreme Court.

The case plays out the final chapter of the decades-long saga of the greatest mining scandal in history, which involved Bre-X, a Calgary-based public company. Bre-X owned Indonesian lands thought to hold $6 billion in gold before the company imploded in 1997 when the claim turned out to be false.

In the wake of Bre-X’s stock collapse, civil lawsuits and criminal investigations were launched all around the world. Groia was hired to defend John Felderhof, one of Bre-X’s directors and senior officers who was charged with fraudulently trading in Bre-X stock.

One of the strangest aspects of the case is that Groia is the only person ever convicted of anything. Stranger still: Groia won a full acquittal for his client Felderhof.

What did Groia do that was so bad during the Felderhof trial? With the public howling for the head of his client, Groia fought hard and used every legal means available to protect his client’s rights. During the trial, the judge cautioned Groia for some his courtroom tactics, including accusing government prosecutors of misconduct. The judge also corrected the prosecutors. Both sides complied with the judge’s direction.

Then the trial took a strange turn. The prosecutors halted the proceedings and accused the judge of being biased against the prosecution. The prosecutors were denied by other independent judges in all of their efforts to have the trial judge removed from the bench.

Then things got even weirder once the trial was over. Although there was no complaint by the public, the trial judge, the prosecutors, trial witnesses or any clients, the Law Society self-initiated an investigation and then pursued charges against Groia for his courtroom conduct.

The Law Society sanctioned Groia after he was found by a hearing panel of his fellow lawyers to have displayed a “consistent pattern of rude, improper or disruptive conduct.” His conviction was upheld by a Law Society appeal panel as well as the Divisional Court and the majority of the Ontario Court of Appeal, which characterized Joe’s conduct as “unprofessional” and “extreme.”

In his dissent, however, Ontario Court of Appeal Justice David Brown identified the main problem with the case against Groia: this lawyer should go free because he complied with the trial judge’s directions. In Justice Brown’s view, the decision to sanction Groia unduly interferes with judicial independence.

Our justice system is set up to protect judges from improper outside influences. These judges are kept separate from other branches of government as well as regulators like the Law Society.

The fact that the Law Society stepped in to sanction Groia will have a broad and insidious chilling effect on how Canadian lawyers defend client interests in the courtroom — and will be particularly damaging in criminal matters.

Most lawyers would agree that polite and civil courtroom behaviour should be the norm. But sometimes litigation devolves into brutal combat, especially when a client’s liberty is at stake against the enormous resources of the state. Only a trial judge is close enough to the action to discipline lawyers for their behaviour.

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By usurping a judge’s authority to regulate courtroom behaviour, the Law Society tarnished the reputation of the judiciary and harmed our system of justice.

Arthur Cockfield is a professor with Queen’s University Faculty of Law. He is the author of Introduction to Legal Ethics.