It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing, on Wednesday, December 27, 2023, of the Honourable Fred Kaufman. By turns a journalist, lawyer, judge of the Court of Appeal, author and teacher, the Honourable Fred Kaufman has left a remarkable legacy for the Quebec and Canadian legal communities.

He was born in 1924 into a Jewish family in Vienna and was evacuated to England on the eve of the Second World War. He arrived in Canada as a teenager, where he was initially detained in internment camps.

He first studied science and then worked as a journalist, going on to study law and being admitted to the Quebec Bar in 1955. He practised criminal law nearly twenty years before being appointed to the Quebec Court of Appeal in 1973, where he sat until 1991.

In 1992, at the end of his judicial career, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. Subsequently, among the many mandates entrusted to him by various provincial and federal governments, he chaired the commission of inquiry into the conviction of Guy-Paul Morin. The Honourable Fred Kaufman also taught at various universities and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002.

The Chief Justice of Québec, the Honourable Manon Savard, and the judges of the Court of Appeal express their deepest condolences to Justice Kaufman’s family and friends on the loss of a remarkable jurist and underscore his exceptional contribution to Quebec and Canadian law.