Beverley McLachlin, ex-chief justice and bestselling author, is keeping her eye on the world's legal drama

DURING BEVERLEY MCLACHLIN’S 28 history- making years on Canada’s Supreme Court bench, she ruled on laws that created a quantum forward leap in the state of human rights in Canada—for Indigenous people, for sex workers, for same-sex couples and for citizens seeking assisted suicide, pre-MAID.

- KATIE UNDERWOOD

Atfer her 2018 retirement, she turned her mighty pen to the fictional kind of legal drama: her latest thriller, Proof, hits shelves on September 17.

McLachlin devoted her remaining time to arbitration work. She also served two terms as an overseas judge on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, a recently wrapped tenure that drew criticism from pro-democracy activists who argued that the 2020 passage of Hong Kong’s National Security Law by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress jeopardized civil liberties within the region. Even as judicial independence appears to be wobbling worldwide—and, in the case of our U.S. neighbours, uncomfortably close to home—McLachlin, now 80, still believes in Canada’s ability to serve justice.

People think of thriller writing as your second act, but you were into fiction before you were even on the bench, right?

I played around with writing when I was teaching law at UBC, before I dreamed of being a judge. I got as far as sending a manuscript to McClelland & Stewart. They were interested, but they told me it would need a lot of work. I was an amateur. I still am, in some ways.

You’ve said you were a precocious reader as a teen, pulling more adult reads from the library’s shelves. We’re not talking Harlequin here, right?

No, no. Real novels, lots from English novelists. I never got as far as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When we weren’t working on our family’s farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta, my brother and I would check out the two-book weekly maximum, then trade. It was a small town. There weren’t that many outlets.

Did you bring your writerly flair to your judicial writing?