Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History – serie

John Beverley Robinson (1791–1863) was one of Upper Canada’s foremost jurists, a dominating influence on the ruling Élite, and a leading citizen of nineteenth-century Toronto who owned a vast tract of land on which Osgoode Hall now stands.The loyalists had founded a colony firm in its devotion to the Crown, with little room for dissent. As a true loyalist son, educated by John Strachan, Robinson attempted to steer Upper Canada toward emulation of what he perceived to be Britain’s ideal aristocratic society.As a young ensign in the York militia, he defended his sovereign at Queenston Heights, and as acting attorney-general he prosecuted traitors who threatened to undermine the colony. Later, as attorney-general and de facto leader of the assembly during the 1820s, he tried to mould the government to the British form. But factors he never understood-the influence of American democracy and liberalism in the Colonial Office-ensured that Upper Canada would never be a ‘new Albion.’Robinson was appointed chief justice in 1829, and his judicial career spanned thirty-three years, during which he insisted the courts were subservient to the legislature and established precedents declaring their role should be limited to the enforcement of existing laws, with no independent creative function. His long service on the bench represented both a preservation and a strengthening of the British tradition in Canadian law.In this biography, early Toronto comes alive through the eyes of a powerful man-firm in his beliefs, attractive to women, respected by his fellows-who sought to mould society to his own ideals. For historians, lawyers, and students of jurisprudence who seek an understanding of the roots of legal practice in nineteenth-century Ontario, it is essential reading.

Few people have had a greater impact on the lives of Canadians than the late Supreme Court judge Justice Emmett Hall. At the forefront of several important judgements in the 1960s and 70s – such as Truscott and Calder – Hall is perhaps best known for his role in the adoption of universal health care at the federal level in 1968. Based on extensive interviews with Hall and people who knew him, Frederick Vaughan's Aggressive in Pursuit tells Hall's remarkable story.Born in Quebec in 1898 and raised in Saskatchewan, Hall had a long and distinguished career as a lawyer. In 1957, former law school classmate Prime Minister John Diefenbaker appointed Hall to the Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench, and four years later to the office of Chief Justice of Saskatchewan. In 1963, Diefenbaker elevated Hall to the Supreme Court of Canada, where he took up the task of universal health care and showed himself to be an aggressive defender of native causes.Aggressive in Pursuit traces Hall's career from his earliest days of private practice in Saskatchewan to the end of his career, and death, in 1994. It shows how one prairie lawyer made a difference in the life of Canada.

]State trials reveal much about a nation's insecurities and shed light on important themes in political, constitutional, and legal history. In Canada, perceived and real threats to the state have ranged from dissent, disaffection, and the emergence of threatening ideologies to insurrection, riot, violent protest, and military invasion. The Canadian State Trials series will explore the role of the law in regulating such threats, from the period of early European settlement to 1971.The first volume and the planned series as a whole present a great deal of new material by prominent Canadian historians and legal scholars. Although certain Canadian political trials and security crises have received scholarly attention in the past, there has never been a comprehensive and systematic examination of the country's surprisingly rich record in this area. The eighteen essays in Volume I examine this record for the period 1608-1837, covering proceedings in New France, the four Atlantic colonies, the Old Province of Quebec, and the two Canadas. They highlight security law during the American revolution, the wars against revolutionary/Napoleonic France, and the War of 1812; comparative treason law; and the trials of David McLane, Robert  Gourlay, Francis Collins, and Joseph Howe, among others. The essays, which extensive use of primary sources (the most illuminating of which appear in a documentary appendix), place the examination of the law and its administration during these events in socio-political and comparative context.

This is the history of the foundations of modern carceral institutions in Ontario. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored primary material – including the papers of prison inspectors and officials and the correspondence of those who wrote to the authorities – Peter Oliver provides a narrative and interpretative account of the penal system in nineteenth-century Ontario.In a century of massive social change, the penal system remained rural, local, decentralized, and resistant to transformations that were affecting other areas of society. Despite the efforts of reformers, neither the political elites nor Ontarians in general paid much attention to the inadequacies of a system plagued by neglect, penny-pinching, and the vagaries of local control. In the 1830s, the Kingston penitentiary and punishment by incarceration became the cornerstones of the system, and these elements, however flawed, dominated the Ontario correctional system until the late twentieth century.'Terror to Evil-Doers' focuses on the purposes and internal management of particular institutions. By synthesizing a wealth of new material into a comprehensive framework, Oliver's seminal study lays the groundwork for future students and scholars of Canadian history, criminology, and sociology.

In 1921, despite the passing of legislation intended to ease the consequences of illegitimacy for children (Children of Unmarried Parents Act), reformers in Ontario made no effort to improve the status of unwed mothers. Furthermore, the reforms that were passed served as models for legislation in other provinces and even in some American states, institutionalizing, in essence, the prejudices evident throughout. Until now, historians have not sufficiently studied these measures, resulting in the marginalization of unwed mothers as historical subjects. In Misconceptions, Lori Chambers seeks to redress this oversight.By way of analysis and careful critique, Chambers shows that the solutions to unwed pregnancy promoted in the reforms of 1921 were themselves based upon misconceptions. The book also explores the experiences of unwed mothers who were subjected to the legislation of the time, thus shedding an invaluable light on these formerly ignored subjects. Ultimately, Misconceptions argues that child welfare measures which simultaneously seek to rescue children and punish errant women will not, and cannot, succeed in alleviating child or maternal poverty.

Historically Canadians have considered themselves to be more or less free of racial prejudice. Although this conception has been challenged in recent years, it has not been completely dispelled. In Colour-Coded, Constance Backhouse illustrates the tenacious hold that white supremacy had on our legal system in the first half of this century, and underscores the damaging legacy of inequality that continues today.Backhouse presents detailed narratives of six court cases, each giving evidence of blatant racism created and enforced through law. The cases focus on Aboriginal, Inuit, Chinese-Canadian, and African-Canadian individuals, taking us from the criminal prosecution of traditional Aboriginal dance to the trial of members of the 'Ku Klux Klan of Kanada.' From thousands of possibilities, Backhouse has selected studies that constitute central moments in the legal history of race in Canada. Her selection also considers a wide range of legal forums, including administrative rulings by municipal councils, criminal trials before police magistrates, and criminal and civil cases heard by the highest courts in the provinces and by the Supreme Court of Canada.The extensive and detailed documentation presented here leaves no doubt that the Canadian legal system played a dominant role in creating and preserving racial discrimination. A central message of this book is that racism is deeply embedded in Canadian history despite Canada's reputation as a raceless society.Winner of the Joseph Brant Award, presented by the Ontario Historical Society

Madame Justice Bertha Wilson, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, is an enormously influential and controversial figure in Canadian legal and political history. This engaging, authorized, intellectual biography draws on interviews conducted under the auspices of the Osgoode Society for Legal History, held in Scotland and Canada with Madame Justice Wilson, as well as with her friends, relatives, and colleagues. The biography traces Wilson's story from her birth in Scotland in 1923 to the present. Wilson's contributions to the areas of human rights law and equality jurisprudence are many and well-known. Lesser known are her early days in Scotland and her work as a minister's wife or her post-judicial work on gender equality for the Canadian Bar Association and her contributions to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.Through a scrupulous survey of Wilson's judgements, memos, and academic writings (many as yet unpublished), Ellen Anderson shows how Wilson's life and the law were seamlessly integrated in her persistent commitment to a stance of principled contextuality. This stance has had an enduring effect on the evolution of Canadian law and cultural history. Supported with the warmth and generosity of Wilson's numerous personal anecdotes, this work illuminates the life and thought of a woman who has left an extraordinary mark on Canada's legal landscape.

Jerry Bannister's The Rule of the Admirals examines governance in Newfoundland from the rule of the fishing admirals in 1699 to the establishment of representative government in 1832. It offers the first in-depth account of the rise and fall of the system of naval government that dominated the island for more than a century.In this provocative look at legal culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland, Bannister explores three topics in detail: naval government in St. John's, surrogate courts in the outports, and patterns in the administration of law. He challenges the conventional view that early Newfoundland was a lawless frontier isolated from the rest of the Atlantic world, and argues that an effective system of naval government emerged to meet the needs of those in power.An original and perceptive work, Bannister's argument demands that we reconsider much of our knowledge of early Newfoundland history. As he re-examines governance prior to an elected assembly and places his analysis firmly within the material conditions of Newfoundland society, Bannister provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of a critical period in the island's colonial development. Ultimately, The Rule of the Admirals sheds light on one of the most misunderstood chapters in Canadian and British colonial history.

In 1791 when the Constitutional Act created a legislative assembly for Upper Canada, the colonists and their British rulers decreed that the operating criminal justice system in the area be adopted from England, to avoid any undue influence from the nearby United States. In this new study of early Canadian law, David Murray has delved into the court records of the Niagara District, one of the richest sets of criminal court records surviving from Upper Canada, to analyze the criminal justice system in the district during the first half of the nineteenth century.Murray explores how far local characteristics affected the operation of a criminal justice system transplanted from England; his analysis includes how legal processes affected Upper Canadian morality, the treatment of the insane, welfare cases, crimes committed in the district, and an examination of the roles of the Niagara magistrates, constables, and juries. Murray concludes by arguing that while the principles and culture of British justice were firmly implanted in the Niagara district, this did not prevent justice from being unequal, especially for women and visible minorities. Integrating the stories of the individuals caught up in the legal system, Murray explores law from a local perspective, and illuminates how the Niagara region's criminal justice system operated under hybrid influences from both Britain and the United States.

When Brian Dickson was appointed in 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada was preoccupied with run-of-the-mill disputes. By the time he retired as Chief Justice of Canada in 1990, the Court had become a major national institution, very much in the public eye. The Court's decisions, reforming large areas of private and public law under the Charter of Rights, were the subject of intense public interest and concern.Brian Dickson played a leading role in this transformation. Engaging and incisive, Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey traces Dickson's life from a Depression-era boyhood in Saskatchewan, to the battlefields of Normandy, the boardrooms of corporate Canada and high judicial office, and provides an inside look at the work of the Supreme Court during its most crucial period. Dickson's journey was an important part of the evolution of the Canadian judiciary and of Canada itself. Sharpe and Roach have written an accessible biography of one of Canada's greatest legal figures that provides new insights into the work of Canada's highest court.

This study of the Manitoba judiciary is not only the first biographical history to examine an entire provincial bench, it is also one of the first studies to offer an internal view of the political nature of the judicial appointment process. Dale Brawn has penned the biographies of the first thirty-three men appointed to Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench. The relative youth of Manitoba as a province and the small size of its legal profession makes possible an exceptionally detailed investigation of the background of those appointed to the province's highest trial court.The biographical data that Brawn has collected for this book highlights the extent to which judicial candidates underwent a socialization process designed to produce a legal elite whose members shared remarkably similar views and ways of thinking. In addition, these biographies suggest that until at least 1950, seats on provincial benches were rewards for political services rendered. Many lawyers became judges not because of their legal ability, but because they had made themselves known in the communities in which they practiced. This fascinating study offers an intimate look at personalities ranging from prime ministers to members of the bench and both senior levels of government.

In 1880 the federal Parliament of Canada repealed the Insolvent Act of 1875, leaving debtor-creditor matters to be regulated by the provinces. Almost forty years later, Parliament finally passed new bankruptcy legislation, recognizing that what was once considered a moral evil had become a commercial necessity. In Ruin and Redemption, Thomas G.W. Telfer analyses the ideas, interests, and institutions that shaped the evolution of Canadian bankruptcy law in this era. Examining the vigorous public debates over the idea of bankruptcy, Telfer argues that the law was shaped by conflict over the morality of release from debts and by the divergence of interests between local and distant creditors. Ruin and Redemption is the first full-length study of the origins of Canadian bankruptcy law, thus making it an important contribution to the study of Canada’s commercial law.

While slavery in Canada was abolished in 1834, discrimination remained. Race on Trial contrasts formal legal equality with pervasive patterns of social, legal, and attitudinal inequality in Ontario by documenting the history of black Ontarians who appeared before the criminal courts from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.Using capital case files and the assize records for Kent and Essex counties, areas that had significant black populations because they were termini for the Underground Railroad, Barrington Walker investigates the limits of freedom for Ontario's African Canadians. Through court transcripts, depositions, jail records, Judge's Bench Books, newspapers, and government correspondence, Walker identifies trends in charges and convictions in the Black population. This exploration of the complex and often contradictory web of racial attitudes and the values of white legal elites not only exposes how blackness was articulated in Canadian law but also offers a rare glimpse of black life as experienced in Canada's past.

After Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in 1945, Canada was shocked by the revelation that its own citizens were engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. P.S. Burn After Reading explores how the Canadian government used the controversial Kellock-Taschereau Commission – sometimes judiciously, sometimes not – to uncover and thwart domestic spies during the early days of the Cold War. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including the Commission’s extensive records, GRU documents turned over by Gouzenko, American Venona decrypts, Soviet KGB archives, and newly released British MI5 and MI6 files, authors Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell provide a comprehensive account of the crisis. They reveal that, despite some civil liberties missteps, the government’s suspicions were largely justified. The book weaves together the evidence against the spies, the tradecraft of Soviet espionage, complex legal challenges faced by the state, and the political fallout. With access to hundreds of newly released British intelligence files, P.S. Burn After Reading offers both specialists and general readers fresh insights into the espionage crisis of 1945–46 and the pivotal role it played in exposing Canada’s postwar security and intelligence vulnerabilities.

In late nineteenth-century Canada, the life insurance industry expanded impressively, offering policy-holders a greater sense of security. However, insurance fraud quickly followed in the footsteps of this boom, with murder sometimes being a deadly outcome. Making a Killing examines six legal cases in 1890s Ontario, where the Crown alleged that the accused had resorted to committing murder to obtain life insurance payouts. The scenarios varied widely, from a staged logging accident to conceal a murder, to a farmer’s wife who allegedly sought to collect the insurance on her husband by putting arsenic in the rhubarb she fed him. Newspapers eagerly reported these and other sensational crimes. Whether farmers or city dwellers, prosperous or poor, all the alleged perpetrators latched onto the quick money promised by the murder of an insured person. Legal historian Ian Radforth mines legal records and newspaper reports to reconstruct these alleged insurance murders and situate them in their Victorian contexts. Together, the fascinating cases reveal how insurance fraud emerged as a prominent public concern in Ontario and beyond.

In the Courts: A Counsel’s Memoir depicts the distinguished life and career of Earl A. Cherniak, K.C., one of Canada’s leading advocates, spanning more than six decades – from 1960 to 2026. Cherniak has been formative to the development of advocacy in Canada’s court systems and is a renowned expert in commercial arbitration and dispute resolution. In this memoir, he reflects on his lifelong association with the firm Lerners, offering a rare glimpse into the life of an advocate in Canadian courts and tribunals. He traces his early years in practice, including clerking for Chief Justice McRuer and appearing in his first Supreme Court of Canada appeals, and explores the transformation of Canadian personal injury and fatal accident damage law, including the landmark Teno v. Arnold trilogy. He also reflects on complex trials, expert evidence, class actions, arbitrations, and high-profile cases, such as International Corona v. Lac Minerals, Horton v. Joyce, Groia v. The Law Society, the Morand, Krever, Patti Starr, and Walkerton public inquiries, and more. Cherniak highlights the lessons learned throughout his long and storied career while meditating on the changing profession. Offering hard-earned wisdom and insight from decades of service in the field, In the Courts will interest lawyers, students, historians, and anyone curious about the past, present, and future of Canadian advocacy.

In December 1883, Peter Lazier was shot in the heart during a bungled robbery at a Prince Edward County farmhouse. Three local men, pleading innocence from start to finish, were arrested and charged with his murder. Two of them — Joseph Thomset and David Lowder — were sentenced to death by a jury of local citizens the following May. Nevertheless, appalled community members believed at least one of them to be innocent — even pleading with prime minister John A. Macdonald to spare them from the gallows.The Lazier Murder explores a community's response to a crime, as well as the realization that it may have contributed to a miscarriage of justice. Robert J. Sharpe reconstructs and contextualizes the case using archival and contemporary newspaper accounts. The Lazier Murder provides an insightful look at the changing pattern of criminal justice in nineteenth-century Canada, and the enduring problem of wrongful convictions.

Combining socio-legal and ethnohistorical studies, this book presents the history of doodem, or clan identification markings, left by Anishinaabe on treaties and other legal documents from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. These doodems reflected fundamental principles behind Anishinaabe governance that were often ignored by Europeans, who referred to Indigenous polities in terms of tribe, nation, band, or village – classifications that failed to fully encompass longstanding cultural traditions of political authority within Anishinaabe society.Making creative use of natural history, treaty pictographs, and the Ojibwe language as an analytical tool, Doodem and Council Fire delivers groundbreaking insights into Anishinaabe law. The author asks not only what these doodem markings indicate, but what they may also reveal through their exclusions. The book also outlines the continuities, changes, and innovations in Anishinaabe governance through the concept of council fires and the alliances between them. Original and path-breaking, Doodem and Council Fire offers a fresh approach to Indigenous history, presenting a new interpretation grounded in a deep understanding of the nuances and distinctiveness of Anishinaabe culture and Indigenous traditions.

From “the Kid” on the Varsity Blues football team to “the Chief” at Osgoode Hall, R. Roy McMurtry has had a remarkably varied and influential career. As reformist attorney general of Ontario, one of the architects of the agreement that brought about the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, high commissioner to the United Kingdom, and chief justice of Ontario, he made a large and enduring contribution to Canadian law, politics, and life.These memoirs cover all these facets of his remarkable career, as well as his law practice, his work on various commissions of inquiry, and his reflections on family, sport, and art. This volume is both an account of his life in public service and a portrait of a humane, humorous, still optimistic, and always decent man.

From “the Kid” on the Varsity Blues football team to “the Chief” at Osgoode Hall, R. Roy McMurtry has had a remarkably varied and influential career. As reformist attorney general of Ontario, one of the architects of the agreement that brought about the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, high commissioner to the United Kingdom, and chief justice of Ontario, he made a large and enduring contribution to Canadian law, politics, and life.These memoirs cover all these facets of his remarkable career, as well as his law practice, his work on various commissions of inquiry, and his reflections on family, sport, and art. This volume is both an account of his life in public service and a portrait of a humane, humorous, still optimistic, and always decent man.

In 1880 the federal Parliament of Canada repealed the Insolvent Act of 1875, leaving debtor-creditor matters to be regulated by the provinces. Almost forty years later, Parliament finally passed new bankruptcy legislation, recognizing that what was once considered a moral evil had become a commercial necessity. In Ruin and Redemption, Thomas G.W. Telfer analyses the ideas, interests, and institutions that shaped the evolution of Canadian bankruptcy law in this era. Examining the vigorous public debates over the idea of bankruptcy, Telfer argues that the law was shaped by conflict over the morality of release from debts and by the divergence of interests between local and distant creditors. Ruin and Redemption is the first full-length study of the origins of Canadian bankruptcy law, thus making it an important contribution to the study of Canada’s commercial law.

In 1880 the federal Parliament of Canada repealed the Insolvent Act of 1875, leaving debtor-creditor matters to be regulated by the provinces. Almost forty years later, Parliament finally passed new bankruptcy legislation, recognizing that what was once considered a moral evil had become a commercial necessity. In Ruin and Redemption, Thomas G.W. Telfer analyses the ideas, interests, and institutions that shaped the evolution of Canadian bankruptcy law in this era. Examining the vigorous public debates over the idea of bankruptcy, Telfer argues that the law was shaped by conflict over the morality of release from debts and by the divergence of interests between local and distant creditors. Ruin and Redemption is the first full-length study of the origins of Canadian bankruptcy law, thus making it an important contribution to the study of Canada’s commercial law.

Madame Justice Bertha Wilson, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, is an enormously influential and controversial figure in Canadian legal and political history. This engaging, authorized, intellectual biography draws on interviews conducted under the auspices of the Osgoode Society for Legal History, held in Scotland and Canada with Madame Justice Wilson, as well as with her friends, relatives, and colleagues. The biography traces Wilson's story from her birth in Scotland in 1923 to the present. Wilson's contributions to the areas of human rights law and equality jurisprudence are many and well-known. Lesser known are her early days in Scotland and her work as a minister's wife or her post-judicial work on gender equality for the Canadian Bar Association and her contributions to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.Through a scrupulous survey of Wilson's judgements, memos, and academic writings (many as yet unpublished), Ellen Anderson shows how Wilson's life and the law were seamlessly integrated in her persistent commitment to a stance of principled contextuality. This stance has had an enduring effect on the evolution of Canadian law and cultural history. Supported with the warmth and generosity of Wilson's numerous personal anecdotes, this work illuminates the life and thought of a woman who has left an extraordinary mark on Canada's legal landscape.

This volume in the Osgoode Society's distinguished series on the history of Canadian law is a tribute to Professor R.C.B. Risk, one of the pioneers of Canadian legal history and for many years regarded as its foremost authority. The fifteen original essays are by notable scholars, some of whom were students of Professor Risk, and represent some of the best and most original work in the area of Canadian legal history. They cover a number of important topics that range from the form of the criminal trial in the eighteenth century, to debates over the meaning of property in the nineteenth, and to lawyer/poet Tom MacInnes's views on the law of aboriginal title in the twentieth century.

A pregnancy outside of marriage was a traumatic event in frontier Canada, one that had profound legal implications, not only for the mother, but also for the woman's family, the alleged father, and for the entire community. Patrick Brode examines the history of the 'heartbalm' torts in nineteenth-century Canada – breaches of duty leading to liability for damages for seduction, breach of promise of marriage, and criminal conversation – that were part of the inherited English law and were a major feature of early Canadian law.Encompassing all ten Canadian provinces, Brode's study examines the court cases and the communities in which they arose. He illustrates the progression of these 'heartbalm' actions as women gained more and more autonomy in the late nineteenth century, until questions arose as to the applicability of these feudal remedies in a modern society. He argues that the heartbalm cases are a testament to how early Canadians tried to control sexuality and courtship, even consensual activity among adults. In mixing legal and social issues, and showing how they interact, Courted and Abandoned makes a significant contribution to legal history, women's studies, and cultural history.

James McGregor Stewart (1889-1955) was perhaps the foremost Canadian corporate lawyer of his day. He was also an appellate counsel, venture capitalist, Conservative Party fundraiser, bibliographer of Rudyard Kipling, and sometime university teacher of classics. A leader of the bar in the inter-war period, he was the first Maritimer to serve as president of the Canadian Bar Association. He distinguished himself mainly in constitutional cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. During his career, Stewart was also head of the leading law firm in eastern Canada (now Stewart McKelvey Stirling Scales), director and vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada, and senior counsel to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations.Above all, Stewart was committed to the idea of law as a truly learned profession and to the bar as the most important legal institution. To this day, no lawyer has held such prestige and power both within and outside Atlantic Canada; in his time he was the only Maritime lawyer who gained full acceptance by every branch of the Canadian establishment.Thematic rather that chronological in approach, this fascinating legal biography provides both a history of a uniquely Canadian career and an interpretation of its significance for Stewart's time and ours.

This second volume of the Canadian State Trials series focuses on the largest state security crisis in 19th century Canada: the rebellions of 1837-1838 and associated patriot invasions in Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Québec). Historians have long debated the causes and implications of the rebellions, but until now have done remarkably little work on the legal aspects of the insurrections and their aftermath. Given that over 350 men were tried for treason or equivalent offences in connection with the rebellions, this volume is long overdue.The essays collected here, written by prominent Canadian historians, legal scholars, and archivists, break new ground in the existing historiography of the rebellions by presenting the first comprehensive examination of the legal dimensions of the crises. In addition to examining trials and court martial proceedings, the essays examine their political, social, and comparative contexts, including the passage of emergency legislation and executive supervision of legal responses, the treatment of women, and the plight of political convicts transported to the Australian penal colonies. Canadian State Trials, Volume Two contributes significantly to the ongoing reassessment of the rebellion period.

When Brian Dickson was appointed in 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada was preoccupied with run-of-the-mill disputes. By the time he retired as Chief Justice of Canada in 1990, the Court had become a major national institution, very much in the public eye. The Court's decisions, reforming large areas of private and public law under the Charter of Rights, were the subject of intense public interest and concern.Brian Dickson played a leading role in this transformation. Engaging and incisive, Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey traces Dickson's life from a Depression-era boyhood in Saskatchewan, to the battlefields of Normandy, the boardrooms of corporate Canada and high judicial office, and provides an inside look at the work of the Supreme Court during its most crucial period. Dickson's journey was an important part of the evolution of the Canadian judiciary and of Canada itself. Sharpe and Roach have written an accessible biography of one of Canada's greatest legal figures that provides new insights into the work of Canada's highest court.

Until the late nineteenth-century, the most common form of local government in rural England and the British Empire was administration by amateur justices of the peace: the sessions system. Petty Justice uses an unusually well-documented example of the colonial sessions system in Loyalist New Brunswick to examine the role of justices of the peace and other front-line low law officials like customs officers and deputy land surveyors in colonial local government.Using the rich archival resources of Charlotte County, Paul Craven discusses issues such as the impact of commercial rivalries on local administration, the role of low law officials in resolving civil and criminal disputes and keeping the peace, their management of public works, social welfare, and liquor regulation, and the efforts of grand juries, high court judges, colonial governors, and elected governments to supervise them. A concluding chapter explains the demise of the sessions system in Charlotte County in the decade of Confederation.