The year of that first meeting was 2002. Inspired and mentored by the Commission on Law and Aging (Commission) of the American Bar Association (ABA) the National Elder Section of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) had just been born and with it an immediate recognition of a new area of practice and of law in Canada. The field of Elder Law or Law and Aging, as it was also known, began in earnest. I explained to Ma?ˆtre L’Heureux-Dubé that from a practice perspective we were serving older adults and those playing important roles in the lives of older adults: legal representatives, family, and other professionals. We would develop a framework for examining and understanding the impact of aging on laws, policies and practices and in so doing take account of the socio-legal and medico-legal dimensions of an aging population. I went on to explain that lawyers had not been at the table, nor were they part of any multidisciplinary bodies examining these important questions of the day. The legal aspects of aging formed no part of the study of gerontology, for example. As lawyers we were particularly equipped to defend legal rights and the important values of older adults: dignity, the freedom from age discrimination; security, including financial and workplace security, the promise of a health care system meeting their needs and protection from abuse and exploitation; and autonomy, the right to be treated as independent beings, even in the presence of diminished capacity.