IN CONTEMPT OF COURT

The Law Is Only One Means To This Lawyer's Ends

When I first talk to Alan Young about his forthcoming book, he is sitting on
a rickety old couch in the Annex, puffing on a joint, with his pal and
former client Terri-Jean Bedford, better known as the Thornhill Dominatrix.
The place is a madhouse. His mammoth-sized dog, Salem, is howling and
whirling around in Cujo-like spasms.

Young is smoking furiously on a cigarette -- between pot puffs -- and
brainstorming with Madame Dominatrix on how to drum up publicity for his
book (which he temporarily was calling The Handjob of Justice.)

"I know how I am going to get some press!" he says, giggling, his legs
jittery with elation. "I'm going to get the City of Toronto charged for
making money off of massage/blow jobs," referring to the fact that the city
charges erotic massage parlours higher licensing fees than their therapeutic
counterparts.

That was before the publisher that had bought his book, Stoddart, went out
of business and he had to start the whole publishing process over again.
When the smoke had cleared, Key Porter Books snapped up the book and will be
publishing it this fall to what Young hopes will be something like the
acclaim he's used to getting for his court appearances, media scrums and law
classes.

Though he's become one of the country's highest profile lawyers, he's in no
way an ordinary one.

In the beginning, law was the furthest thing from the mind of Alan Young the
rabble-rousing Marxist teenager who grew up on the Bridle Path ("I was your
typical Communist kid who had a pool.") In fact, he'd been studying
playwriting with W.O. Mitchell at York when his parents urged him to apply
to law school. He was cavorting in France that summer when his mom called to
say he'd gotten in. One thing led to another, and he was a lawyer for 18
years. Young says he sacrificed his artistic dreams because he could take on
the cases he really cared about. A job teaching law at York paid the bills.

Now Young is back where he left off. "I just need the book to come out to
psychologically make the transition between lawyer and writer. You're only a
writer when some goofball wants to put a cover on your book."

Over the course of his career, Young became a sort of counsel to the
underground. At one time or another, he has gone to bat for medicinal pot
smokers (including AIDS patient Jim Wakeford in 1999, a case that led
directly to the creation of the first medical marijuana in the country), a
journalist who was accused of watching the Bernardo tapes (he dropped that
one), a record store owner who was charged with under the obscenity laws for
selling a 2 Live Crew album (he lost that one) and Bedford, who ran "The
Bondage Bungalow" (strike three). "I represent pleasure-seekers," says
Young, who makes friends of many of his clients.

Young takes the Charter cases that few lawyers will touch -- most of them
are losing cases. He uses circus-style tactics designed to gain public
attention and support for a cause in court. He has been known, for instance,
to call a fully armoured S/M bullwhip master to the stand. For this, Young
has developed a reputation as a media whore. An editor at a major Canadian
magazine once dismissed Young, saying, "The guy wakes up and looks for the
camera."

Even so, Young has pursued many less glamorous cases. He has represented
countless unknowns who drift in and out of the courts -- the mentally ill,
prostitutes and junkies. Most of his work is on the house (in all, he says
he has given almost half a million dollars in pro bono counsel).

He is most known for his weed work. It's also where he's had the most
success. Young, who was recently named "Freedom Fighter of the Year" by High
Times magazine, is the only lawyer in Canada to so publicly plug pot use. He
helped set up the Toronto Compassion Centre in 1998, was called as a witness
in its defense after the St. Clair and Bathurst organization. which
distributed marijuana to about 1,200 seriously ill clients, was raided on
Aug. 13 of last year, and he will probably be sparking up a celebratory
reefer on July 10 -- which marks the second year in Canada without an
enforceable pot law. Young is pretty much responsible for this newfound
liberty. Over the years, he has filed a myriad motions on behalf of
pot-smoking AIDS patients, marijuana magazine sellers, pot cultivators and
hemp stores.

"Alan's efforts have made a significant contribution to the smoke 'em if you
got 'em age we are living in," says Paul Burstein, director of the Criminal
Law Intensive Program at Osgoode.

The thread that runs through all of his lurid and long cases is Young's
interpretation of civil liberties and his belief that the law should focus
on serious crimes. "People are getting murdered, beaten and robbed and I'm
showing up in court 10 times because Homer allowed his dick to make a
decision. The courts should allow people to take responsibility for their
own actions."

Young's views have made an imprint on a new generation of lawyers, many of
whom took his theatrical classes at Osgoode.

"I remember the first day he came in wearing Chinese slippers, sat on a
desk, and asked the students 'How the fuck are you?' It was bizarre,"
remembers lawyer Leora Shenesh, who took his first-year class in 1998. She
also recalls how Young would get students to re-enact a crime using plastic
vomit and how he gave students an exam question involving a "man with a
tattooed ass." His flashiest scholastic stunt, however, was when he brought
in Bedford to whip up appreciation for the S/M sector. Young was strapped
into a straightjacket and hooked up to cattle prods for the lesson. "I
wanted to demystify the law for students, bring it down the most basic
level," he says.

Young's career reached its peak during the late 1990s. He was getting three
or four requests a day for new cases and the international media was
hounding him (he even appeared on Geraldo). Odd then, that he chose that
moment to toss it all away. In 1999, he went on TVO to announce that he was
through with law and was taking up the Japanese flute and shiatsu massage to
mull over life's meaning. But it seemed that his period of quiet
contemplation expired when he started writing a book that contends "Lawyers
are a cancer on society," (with chapters like "Killing all the lawyers" and
"The Buddha in Paul Bernardo.")

He decided to write it after becoming fed up with the criminal justice
system, and after his wife left him for a judge and he had some financial
difficulties with his legal partner.

Young says it soon became too tricky to juggle Zen with the need to pump out
a 500-page diatribe. "Here I would be in white robes meditating and then I'd
have to get in front of the computer and chain-smoke and rant about blow
jobs and lawyers."

So he dumped the Zen.

His book is now called Justice Defiled: Pot Heads, Perverts, Serial Killers
and Lawyers. In it, Young argues that the adversarial justice system breeds
corruption, elitism and inefficiency. He calls for the establishment of a
"community court" where most problems are resolved among the interested
parties. Of course, Justice Defiled isn't really a sober legal analysis.
"I've written this book almost as if I'm at the bar stool ranting to someone
I don't know," says Young. "I call it my professional suicide note."

Now, after two years of writing and re-writing, he found his goofballs and
has his cover. Last spring, I meet up with Young at a lavish publishing expo
at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The Key Porter booth is toasting its
writers. Decked out in a Homer Simpson T-shirt, he takes me aside and
complained that Key Porter has shied away from going with his cover
suggestion of Madame Liberty screwing a dildo. "They think lawyers are going
to be afraid to read it on the subway. Lawyers don't ride the fucking
subway!" he says in a hush.

Despite his fretting over the cover, Young insists he'll be quite content as
an artist toiling away at home on his computer. He's even gotten a head
start on his next book and first novel, a story about the trial of Satan.

Still, I'm not convinced that he is through with the litigational limelight.
Sitting in his newer, schmancier apartment -- a few blocks away from his old
house -- he says, "Once I rid the country of the demonization of pot,
everything will follow." He is leaning back in his leather chair, his knees
once again jittering excitedly. There is a conspiratorial glint in his eyes.