Solomon Greenberg – the man behind the moot

Today’s law students crave hands-on experience before they start articling. While the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law currently offers numerous opportunities for experiential learning with a host of clinics, externships and national moot competitions, there was a time when only one such opportunity existed. That opportunity came about in 1964, when the Faculty of Law was still housed at Winnipeg’s downtown courthouse. The Solomon Greenberg Moot Court Competition was established by Mrs. Gertrude (née Koman) Greenberg in her husband’s memory, offering a prize to the top student competing in this intramural criminal trial advocacy competition. Naming this competition after Greenberg was significant because he was considered one of the best criminal defence lawyers in Western Canada, with 99 reported cases over his 40-year legal career.

The name of Solomon Greenberg (1894 – 1958) is well known to the hundreds of UM Faculty of Law alumni who have competed in the annual competition for the past six decades. What they may not know, is that the man behind the moot competition was remarkable, humble, thoughtful, “a legend in his profession and a hero to his clients, who were mostly people of modest means,” as Norm Larsen writes in Notable People from Manitoba’s Legal History. Greenberg’s son, Lionel Greenberg, who turns 100 in September, 2026, connects the past to the present with memories of his father.

“Love, admiration and pride”

Neither Lionel, nor his son and daughter (Solomon’s grandchildren), Daniel and Elena, followed in their ancestor’s legal footsteps but are in full support of their late mother and grandmother’s decision to honour the legacy of the elder Greenberg by establishing the moot competition prize six years after his death, which Lionel says she did out of “A combination of love, admiration and pride.”

Greenberg’s humility about his work is apparent in how he went about his family life. Did his career impact young Lionel’s career choices?

“Not at all. But he and my mother were very supportive of my career choice in music. I was lucky,” says Lionel, who studied both violin and piano, the latter becoming his main instrument. “Both parents enjoyed music very much, they were always listening to music in the house. We had a Victrola that you had to wind up. My sister also played the piano and became a fine soprano.”

Lionel recalls that while riding the streetcar together one day, he told his father he would need to teach to support his music career. “He [Solomon] responded, “I guess I won’t be able to retire, I’ll have to keep working.””

“A combination of very tough and soft”

Despite being very aware of his father’s legal work, Lionel never saw Greenberg in action in court, and dinner table conversations did not involve discussions of his father’s legal practice. “My father talked rarely about law. We mostly talked about the war, politics and family. Particularly about a nephew who was killed in Hong Kong.”

The politically-aware Greenberg took both the Winnipeg Free Press and The Winnipeg Tribune, and read political journals, Lionel recalls. “My father was the patriarch of the extended family. They all relied on his wise counsel. For example, a cousin who was a hockey player was offered a scholarship at a University in Vienna in the 1930’s. He consulted my father who advised him not to go. Shortly after that the Germans took over Austria.”

In 1935, Lionel’s parents visited family in Odessa, which was part of Russia at the time (now the third-largest city in Ukraine). Greenberg had been born in Odessa in 1894 and after his father died in 1901, his mother emigrated with her seven children to Winnipeg in about 1911. Greenberg graduated from St. John’s High School in 1915 and from the Manitoba Law School in 1918, articled with Conde and Taylor and was called to the Manitoba bar in 1919. He was for a time in private practise, then for 17 years in partnership with the late Simon Abrahamson. In 1953 he was joined by M. J. Arpin under the firm name of Greenberg and Arpin which was later expanded to Greenberg, Arpin and Rich.

Within the Greenberg family, all the wage-earners helped the relatives who struggled, Lionel notes. Of his father, he recalls, “He was a combination of very tough and soft. He was heartbroken at the loss of his mother.”

An anti-establishment Q.C. 

The public Greenberg was well-respected and fearless. In a 1971 Manitoba Government news release announcing Greenberg’s posthumous appointment as Queen’s Counsel, Attorney General Al Mackling stated, "Those familiar with the courts at the height of Mr. Greenberg's service recall that he was a trial lawyer of great talent, representing the accused in many of the leading trials of those years. A master of the art of cross-examination, he invariably won the respect of witnesses and counsel on all sides of a given case."

Mackling said the fact Mr. Greenberg had been overlooked during his lifetime as recipient of a Q.C. had been a matter of regret expressed publicly on a number of occasions by leading members of the legal profession.

Interestingly, Joe Zuken a Winnipeg city councillor and popular communist politician, accepted his own Q.C. appointment in 1970, despite believing that the award had been debased over the years to the point of being merely a reward for political loyalty rather than legal ability. Doug Smith in his biography Joe Zuken: Citizen and Socialist (1990) records Zuken as explaining, “One reason I accepted it was Solomon Greenberg, in order to prove that one has the right not to be discriminated against politically.”

An advocate to the end

Larsen’s book records an anecdote from late UM Law professor Dale Gibson who, in an historical Law Society publication, told of a feud between Greenberg and Justice Arnold Campbell which apparently began when Greenberg appealed Campbell’s first decision as a judge – especially because of how Greenberg worded the appeal against the rookie decision. Legend had it, Gibson reports, that subsequently, “Greenberg was cross-examining a witness before Campbell when the witness pulled a gun.

“Campbell calmly said to Greenberg, “Well, don’t stand in front of him. Serves you right anyway, the way you were badgering him.”

“Not so well known,” Gibson continues, “is that when Greenberg was stricken in the courtroom, it was Campbell who rode with him to the hospital in an ambulance.”

Greenberg died in hospital at the age of 64, a few days after having been stricken with a heart attack in a Winnipeg courtroom in September, 1958, advocating for justice.