Murray Klippenstein
Murray
Klippenstein has spent years building the foundations for a
successful public interest centred law firm, resulting in a series of
groundbreaking cases in various areas of law and community concern.
Perhaps Murray's best-known work is his representation of the estate and family of Dudley George, a native rights activist who was shot and killed by police at Ipperwash Provincial Park in Ontario in 1995. Dudley's brother Sam George and other family members called for a public judicial inquiry, based on indications that the killing was politically directed or influenced. When stonewalled by then Premier of Ontario Mike Harris, the family sued the police, the province, Premier Harris, and other parties, stating that they would drop the lawsuit if an inquiry was called. After eight years of non-stop litigation battles, a newly elected Ontario government finally called the public inquiry the family had always urged. The inquiry, presently ongoing, has revealed the intense involvement of then Premier Harris in the run-up to the shooting. The case is the subject of the 2006 CTV television movie "One Dead Indian", and a book of the same name.
Murray has represented a leading Ontario environmental group in a series of Ontario Energy Board hearings that has reshaped the province's electrical and natural gas utilities into important advocates of energy conservation, has defended Terri-Jean Bedford's right to practice safe S&M in private wearing the black leather of the mysterious Madame de Sade, and has won millions of dollars in compensation for a First Nation whose ancestral lands were encroached upon by illegal hydro flooding.
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Murray's varied legal practice has also taken him to the remotest reaches of Ontario, where he has attended many solemn regional assemblies of First Nation Chiefs and elders on the shores of James Bay and assisted in the development of regional self-government, to Toronto courtrooms, where he successfully established an environmentalist's Charter right to grow a natural garden as a form of expressing fundamental values and conducts other various civil litigation, and to the meeting rooms of many non-profit housing co-operatives, where he helps affordable housing communities to operate effectively for the benefit of their members.
Murray's clients often have important things to say on public interest issues, so Murray has helped them to effectively put forward their previously silenced viewpoints on the front pages of national newspapers, on prime time national TV news, in nation-wide radio interviews, and in the Question Periods of Ottawa's House of Commons and Ontario's Legislature.
Murray has served extensively on the Boards of Directors and executive committees of many public interest organizations and legal clinics, such as Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto (which Murray helped found), the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, Environmental Defence Canada (formerly the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund, of which Murray was President) and the Canadian Environmental Law Association.
Murray has been a guest lecturer at the Faculties of Law of the University of Toronto and Queen's University and elsewhere including Osgoode Hall Law School. He has also been a speaker at conferences of the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Ontario Justice Education Network, and the Law Union of Ontario as well as many community organized events.
Murray graduated from Queen's University and the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law and articled at the Canadian Environmental Law Association.
Basil Alexander
Basil joined Klippensteins as an articling student in 2004. Everybody
likes him, including the office dog.
As an undergraduate at McMaster University, Basil performed poorly in varsity sports.
On the other hand, his academic record was outstanding, and it is also claimed by his enemies and his mother that in addition Basil practically ran the whole university when he was there, serving in countless capacities, including as an elected Vice-President of McMaster's undergraduate Students' Union, a member of the University's Planning and Budget Committees, a member of the Board of Directors of the campus radio station, President of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, a member of about 500 committees, and eventually as McMaster's undergraduate Valedictorian at graduation. He won numerous awards, including the Students' Union's "Assembly Member of the Year Award" and the "Honour M Award", McMaster's highest honour conferred in recognition of outstanding service to the McMaster University community.
And that was just for starters. Basil really got busy while obtaining his law degree and master's degree in public administration at the University of Victoria. He again excelled academically, and won the law school's prize in Indian Lands, Rights and Governance. Basil helped write course materials for the Akitsiraq Law School in Nunavut (where he also worked as a judges' assistant for a summer). In his spare time Basil served on the University's Board of Governors and on the University Senate, and was a member of the University's Finance Committee, its Planning and Priorities Committee and its Campus Development Committee. Basil was elected to the Faculty of Law's Faculty Council, and also served as the President of the Graduate Students' Society for the University. The University eventually selected Basil for membership in its Blue and Gold Circle, which Basil claims is the most prestigious tribute a UVic student can receive for community endeavors.
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His record in sports at UVic was, again, not very good.
Basil's public policy bent and his strong community commitment lead him to Klippensteins, where he demanded to work only on intellectually interesting public interest work on the side of the angels (in fact, he has had to do a little bit of more ordinary stuff too).
As an articling student, Basil continued his record of success with important stints at the Ipperwash Inquiry and at an important native treaty rights trial, where his cross-examination performances had other senior counsel quietly hinting that he might in fact be the most accomplished lawyer at the firm. The firm also invented numerous unnecessary committees to keep Basil busy and happy.
At his call to the Bar in July 2005, Basil was among those presented with the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Prize for being one of the top 25 Bar Admission Course students in Ontario's graduating lawyer class of over 1000 for the year, at which point the firm decided to overlook his faults and hire him back as an associate. The rest of us at the firm don't see how we can stop him from eventually managing everything at the firm, other than hoping he leaves to earn more money elsewhere, or shuffling him off to head up the national civil service.