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Professor Cutler, thank you so much for being here. You've been a great inspiration to me throughout my whole life and legal career. You've done so much in your career. You were a member of parliament from 1999 to 2013, your minister of justice from 2003 to 2006. You are currently the chair of the Royal Wallenberg Center for Human Rights. You are known as a leader in human rights throughout the world. And you've done so much. Simply saying you've been an inspiration to me would be really not doing you justice because you've not only been an inspiration, but you've actually provided or facilitated providing people physical freedom, which is the ultimate gift.

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I'm curious to know about your background. Where did you get such a strong moral compass and when did you know you wanted to pursue a career in law or human rights for that? I actually I think both those questions go back to the teachings of my parents of a blessed memory. It was my father who taught me at a very young age when I really couldn't fully appreciate the profundity of the message. But he would, you know, repeat it over the years.

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And the moral compass message in effect was that the pursuit of justice. And he could also use the Hebrew dedicated to the pursuit of justice, he said, is equal to all the other commandments combined. He said, this is what you must teach onto your children. He said this must be your life's credo, in effect, your moral compass. But I have to say that when my mother would hear my father sharing this message with me over the years, she also imparted her own message, which was that if you want to pursue justice, you have to understand, you have to feel the injustice of you have to go in and about your community and beyond and feel the injustice and combat the injustice.

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Otherwise, as she put it, the pursuit of justice will be a theoretical abstraction. So I suspect that as a result of the teaching of my parents, which was buttressed by when I was in Jewish Day school, two of my teachers were Holocaust survivors. They didn't speak early about this, but over a period of time they shared their stories. And I think that also had that, you know, connectivity. Back to my parents message, when you're exposed to the horror of horrors, too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happen.

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And the thing that I always feel, whether we're talking about the Holocaust or the genocides that followed, whether it be in Rwanda or Darfur or more recently with the Rohingya and the wiggers, that what makes the Holocaust and the genocide that followed so unspeakable. And not only the horrors of the genocides themselves, that would be bad enough, what makes them so unspeakable is that they were preventable. Nobody could say we did not know. We knew, but we did not act.

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And I mentioned the wiggers because we know now and we're still not acting. So I think the moral compass goes back early teachings of my parents Jewish Day schools. And I have to also say that when I was in high school, the person who taught me the secular studies program, who taught all the secular studies was Irving Layton, the poet. Therefore, to this day, I know nothing about physics, chemistry and math because he taught the whole secular studies program.

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But he embodied in him really almost the the personality of a kind of Jeremiah. You almost looked like one with thought. And he always railed against injustice. And I always implored us to pursue justice. So the remarkable thing was that Irving Layton was taking me back to the messages of both my parents and then to my father's friendship circle with this close, including people like David Lewis. My father himself was a lawyer. I like to say more a jurist than a lawyer.

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He would always read to me from the great jurist of the day. So he was the personification of a jurist in the best sense. And his friends were people like David Lewis, who went on to head up the Democratic Party, a a great Canadian poet, Frank Scott, who taught my father at McGill Law School and who eventually taught me. And so there was a lot of this camaraderie and I think that brought everything together. Wow. Unbelievable.

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And your journey into law, was that following in your father's footsteps? What did you know back then? That law was a good way to make a difference in the world of human rights. I think the juxtaposition of my father's message and my parents messages about pursuing justice and combating injustice, my father being the lawyer, those of his friends like David Lewis and others also being lawyers but who all had a passion for justice, led me to believe that the way to pursue justice would be to do it through the law.

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And so I learned early on that this could be a pathway to justice. And so by the time I was in high school, I already knew that this is what I wanted to do.

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Well, inspirational. And I say that because I also studied law partially like you, to try to make a difference and help people. And I still want to do that. But I find myself doing real estate closings and estate planning instead. So I'm wondering, what was your first job and what did you go straight into the human rights field or did you have some private practice experience, law? Well, I after I graduated law school, I did graduate work at Yale Law School and I actually was on my way having done this to a doctorate when Elliott Trudeau was elected in 1968.

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Prime Minister. And there was a feeling of hope at the time that Camelot's, to use that metaphor, was in the air. And I remember writing a letter to the newly appointed Minister of Justice, John Turner, whom I did not know, and I basically wrote him a letter saying, you know, I'm here at Yale, I'm doing my Ph.D., but I'm getting somewhat intellectually hydrated here in the library. And like, I really would like to get involved in issues relating to law reform, human rights, poverty law, as I learned that at Yale.

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And he invited me to an interview and a week later invited me to work with them. And so my first job was with John Turner when he was minister of justice. And the great thing about that experience is that it exposed me both to the importance of parliament and the notion of parliament as a place where decisions take place and the parliamentarians are the trustees of the people. And he was not only a consummate parliamentarian Turner as minister of justice, he took parliament very seriously, but he was a consummate Democrat.

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He taught me all the time that, you know, democracies don't happen by accident and they don't continue, that you have to work at democracy and parliament has to work a democracy. And as minister of justice, he gave me a lot of scope to be involved in areas of criminal justice reform, judicial reform. We established institutional reforms through the Federal Court of Canada and Law Reform Commission of Canada was also very involved in issues that today have become maybe much more commonplace.

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But he was a real environmentalist and environmental protection for him was was crucial. So it was one of the pillars of the work that we were involved in. Human rights was crucial. And so we embarked then on what ultimately was to become the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms he cared a lot about for the poor. And through that, we worked together on establishing a neighborhood legal services system which we borrowed from Yale Law School. My clinical experience is there, so the timing was perfect.

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The person whom I was working for, John Turner, could not have been a better mentor and a better role model about what it means to be a minister of justice, a parliament, a parliamentarian, a Democratic had. Interestingly enough, when I became minister of justice and attorney general myself years later, some 40 years after that experience, I have to say that I had that role model in mind and luckily enough, it was my first job. Wow.

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That's that's really incredible.

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And.