Legal History Commons^™

New Directions In Judicial Biography: More Humane, More Transnational, More Comparative, Philip Girard

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Canadian Privacy Law And The Post-War Freedom Of Information Paradigm, Jonathon W. Penney

Articles & Book Chapters

An overemphasis on technology among Canadian privacy scholars has neglected other important historical factors in the development of privacy law. The chapter aims to help fill that void through a case study examining how a broader Post War paradigm, centred on freedom of information, impacted on Canada's most important early privacy laws, including Canada's first privacy law - Part VI of the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977); the federal Privacy Act (1983); and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)(2000). The case study suggests that despite wider concerns about privacy when each law was enacted, those concerns were …

Rearguard Or Vanguard? A New Look At Canada’S Constitutional Act Of 1791, Philip Girard

Articles & Book Chapters

The Constitutional Act 1791, which provided representative governments to Upper and Lower Canada, has often been regarded as a reactionary document. Here, a comparison with the constitutions of the eastern colonies of British North America as well as the pre-revolutionary constitutions of the Thirteen Colonies reveals a variety of ways in which the 1791 Act was more liberal and more committed to the popular element of the constitution than its comparators. The significance of the statutory form of the 1791 Act is emphasised and contrasted with the much less secure position of the popular element under prerogative constitutions. Significant concessions …

Law And Empire, 1500–1812, Philip Girard, Catherine Evans

Articles & Book Chapters

When we think about law and empire, it is most accurate, if inelegant, to pluralize everything: empires, colonies, peoples, cultures, sources of law. The transnational turn has dramatic implications for the history of law in the Americas. Most obviously, especially for the period from 1500 to 1812, scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the role of European empires – including the British, French, and Spanish – in shaping America’s legal cultures. Groups of colonists from across Europe brought a multiplicity of understandings of law and social order with them, encountering Indigenous nations with their own rich legal traditions. Colonists used …

L’Émergence D’Une Monarchie Française Indépendante, 1100-1314 : Le Rejet De La Suprématie Papale, Kent Mcneil

Articles & Book Chapters

The struggle between the Pope and secular rulers of Western Europe for political supremacy was a dominant theme in the medieval world. The kings of France and England in particular asserted their authority and independence, leading to the development of nation states. This form of political organization was standardized in Europe in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia and exported to the rest of the world through colonialism. This article tells the story of the power struggle between the Pope and the kings of France, from which the kings emerged victorious, contributing to the creation of the modern world.

Pillars Of Justice: Lawyers And The Liberal Tradition, By Owen Fiss, Saba Samanian

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

AT TIMES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO UNDERESTIMATE, or perhaps momentarily forget, the individuals who have been instrumental in shaping the evolution of the justice system. Thankfully, Pillars of Justice by Owen Fiss serves as a reminder of the resilience and the triumph of such individuals. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to someone who he considers to have made a significant contribution to justice, and, as such, has become a personal hero.

St-Laurent, Judging, Justice, And The Death Penalty In The Shadow Of The Cold War, Philip Girard

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Contrasting Fates Of French Canadian And Indigenous Constitutionalism: British North America, 1760-1867, Philip Girard

Articles & Book Chapters

In the century after the fall of New France, both Indigenous peoples of Canada and French Canadians could be described as colonised peoples. Yet the treatment of each group's pre-existing laws and the ways in which each found its constitutional demands recognised (or not) varied considerably. In spite of significant rebellions in 1837-1838, French Canadians went on to achieve a high degree of autonomy within the province of Quebec in the British North America Act 1867. Meanwhile, intercultural legal arrangements with Indigenous peoples, such as the Covenant Chain, which could be termed constitutional, were gradually undermined, ignored and forgotten. This …

Replaying The Past: Roles For Emotion In Judicial Invocations Of Legislative History, And Precedent, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

Legal reasoning in the common law tradition requires judges to draw on concepts, and examples that are meant to resonate with a particular emotional import and operate in judicial reasoning as though they do. Judicial applications of constitutional rights are regularly interpreted by reference to past violations (either through precedent, contextual framings, and/or legislative history), which in turn elicit a series of emotions which work to deepen and intensify judicial understandings of a right guarantee (freedom of association, freedom of expression, equality, security of the person, etc.). This paper examines the way in which invocations of past political histories, and …

Law, Autonomy, And Local Government: A Legal History Of Municipal Corporations In Canada West/Ontario, 1850-1880, Mary Margaret Pelton Stokes

PhD Dissertations

The historiography of local government in mid-nineteenth century Canada West/Ontario is divided on the question of municipal autonomy. The more dominant thesis asserts that the Municipal Corporations (Baldwin) Act of 1849 ushered in a period of freedom for municipalities. The second depicts the Act as oppressive of autonomy in the interests of economic development. Both interpretations are based largely on extrapolation from earlier and later periods; there have been no direct examinations of local governance in Canada West/Ontario for what may be considered its formative period, from 1850 to 1880. In addition, much that has been written has been conceptually …

Toxic Enactments: Materializing Estrogen And Regulation Under Canada's Food And Drugs Act, 1939-1953, Lara Jessie Tessaro

LLM Theses

The study describes how estrogen was standardized in Canada, in the 1940s and early 1950s, under the Food and Drugs Act. Contributing to interdisciplinary conversations, it provides an empirical case of how regulatory practices enact material realities. Using archival material, the study describes how estrogen was achieved, in part, through heterogeneous practices of the Canadian Committee on Pharmacopoeial Standards, National Health, and government solicitors. These regulators disagreed on whether, how, and by whom estrogens should be standardized. Rather than resolve these disagreements, Canada enacted multiple regulations purporting to standardize estrogen, and government solicitors practiced techniques of validating to render the …

Working Time, Dinner Time, Serving Time: Labour And Law In Industrialization, Douglas Hay

Articles & Book Chapters

Many economic historians agree that increased labour inputs contributed to Britain’s primary industrialisation. Voluntary self-exploitation by workers to purchase new consumer goods is one common explanation, but it sits uneasily with evidence of poverty, child labour, popular protest, and criminal punishments explored by social historians. A critical and neglected legal dimension may be the evolution of contracts of employment. The law of master and servant, to use the technical term, shifted markedly between 1750 and 1850 to advantage capital and disadvantage labour. Medieval in origin, it had always been adjudicated in summary hearings before lay magistrates, and provided penal sanctions …

Canada’S First Malpractice Crisis: Medical Negligence In The Late Nineteenth Century, R. Blake Brown

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article describes and explains the first Canadian medical malpractice crisis. While malpractice had emerged as a prominent legal issue in the United States by the mid nineteenth century, Canadian doctors first began to express concerns with a growth in malpractice litigation in the late nineteenth century. Physicians claimed that lawsuits damaged reputations and forced them to spend lavishly on defending themselves. Doctors blamed lawyers for drumming up spurious lawsuits and argued that ignorant or malicious jurors tended to side with plaintiffs. Evidence, however, points to additional factors that contributed to litigation. Medical professionals in rural areas sometimes avoided lengthy …

Sex, Race, And Motel Guests: Another Look At King V Barclay, Sarah E. Hamill

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The 1961 case of King v Barclay is something of a footnote in the history of discrimination against Black Canadians. If it is cited at all, it is usually cited alongside the more famous racism cases, such as Christie v York, as proof of the widespread nature of racism in Canada. In this paper, I re-read the trial decision and examine the original case file to show that the facts of King and the racism in the case are more complex than usually realized. King emerged out of a series of errors from both King and Barclay’s Motel which resulted …

Pardon And Parole In Prohibition-Era New York: Discretionary Justice In The Administrative State, Carolyn Strange

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Historians of early-modern England and British colonies have productively applied Douglas Hay’s germinal study of mercy. In contrast, historians of the United States have overlooked the utility of the conceptual tools Hay provided to prize open the mitigation of punishment across time and place. In the decade that followed the First World War, disputes over the proper role of mercy and administrative discretion were as heated as they were in Hanoverian England. In Jazz Age New York, fears of gangsterism and concern over the apparent laxity of parole regulations put the proponents of Progressive penology on the defensive. This article …

When Wage Theft Was A Crime In Canada, 1935-1955: The Challenge Of Using The Master’S Tools Against The Master, Eric Tucker

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In recent years the term “wage theft” has been widely used to describe the phenomenon of employers not paying their workers the wages they are owed. While the term has great normative weight, it is rarely accompanied by calls for employers literally to be prosecuted under the criminal law. However, it is a little known fact that in 1935, Canada enacted a criminal wage theft law, which remained on the books until 1955. This article provides an historical account of the wage theft law, including the role of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads, the legislative debates and amendments that …

Promises Of Law: The Unlawful Dispossession Of Japanese Canadians, Eric M. Adams, Jordan Stanger-Ross

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article is about the origins, betrayal, and litigation of a promise of law. In 1942, while it ordered the internment of over twenty-one thousand Canadians of Japanese descent, the Canadian government enacted orders in council authorizing the Custodian of Enemy Property to seize all real and personal property owned by Japanese Canadians living within coastal British Columbia. Demands from the Japanese-Canadian community and concern from within the corridors of government resulted in amendments to those orders stipulating that the Custodian held that property as a “protective” trust and would return it to Japanese Canadians at the conclusion of the …

Musings And Silences Of Chief Justice William Osgoode: Digest Marginalia About The Reception Of Imperial Law, G. Blaine Baker

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article focuses on musings and silences in the margins of Canadian Chief Justice William Osgoode’s late-eighteenth-century law library, to understand the role he assigned to Westminster-based imperial law in the transmission of British justice to the colonies. It concludes that this role was limited, mostly by Osgoode’s greater commitment of time and energy to legislative and executive branches of government than to the judiciary, and by his sometimes cavalier impatience with English courts and legal commentators.

The Brussels Peace Conference Of 1874 And The Modern Laws Of Belligerent Qualification, Tracey Leigh Dowdeswell

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The Brussels Conference of 1874 was convened after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). At stake was not only the restoration of the fragile balance of power in Europe, but also the articulation of a new ideal of warfare and its role in the European state system. This article discusses the Conference in relation to the “new war” thesis put forth by Mary Kaldor in New and Old Wars (1999). It was at Brussels that the “old war” crystalized as a political ideal: war would be a tournament, fought by professional armies, organized by nation states; civilians who refrained from participation would …

Let The Facts Speak For Themselves: The Empiricist Origins Of The Right To Remain Silent, Randa Helfield

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Historians have traced the right to silence to early canon law, the political conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even The Prisoner’s Counsel Act, which effectively silenced the accused by allowing his lawyer to speak for him. This article argues that changes in philosophical notions of truth best explain how, given the importance of the accused’s testimony at the altercation trial, her silence could ever have been tolerated and ultimately enforced as a right. By the mid-eighteenth century, the rise of empiricism had shifted the trial’s reliance on testimony to a preference for facts, which seemed more immediately …

On Writing Labour Law History: A Reconnaissance, Eric M Tucker

Articles & Book Chapters

Labour law historians rarely write about the theoretical and methodological foundations of their discipline. In response to this state of affairs, this article adopts a reconnaissance strategy, which eschews any pretense at providing a synthesis or authoritative conclusions, but rather hopes to open up questions and paths of inquiry that may encourage others to also reflect on a neglected area of scholarship. It begins by documenting and reflecting on the implications of the fact that labour law history sits at the margins of many other disciplines, including labour history, legal history, labour law, industrial relations and law and society, but …

Class Roots: The Genesis Of The Ontario Class Proceedings Act, 1966 - 1993, Suzanne Erica Chiodo

LLM Theses

Nearly 25 years since its passage, the Ontario Class Proceedings Act has become one of the most frequently debated procedural mechanisms of its kind. The CPA came about following the release of the Attorney Generals Advisory Committee (AGAC) Report in 1990. None of the current narratives explain how this Report pulled together so many divergent interests where previous attempts had failed. My thesis answers this question with reference to the historical sources and the legal, political and social changes that took place throughout this period.

This thesis also highlights the unique nature of the AGAC consultation process, which saw the …

Lost In Translation? The Difference Between Hearsay Rule's Historical Rationale And Practical Application, Christopher Lloyd Sewrattan

LLM Theses

An examination of the difference between the hearsay rules historical rationale and current application. The analysis occurs in three steps. In section 1, the historical rationale of the hearsay rule is identified through a reconciliation of competing theories. Section 2 analyses the difference between the hearsay rules historical rationale and the application of the exclusionary hearsay rule. Section 3 analyses the difference between the hearsay rules historical rationale and the application of some categorical hearsay exceptions.

Overall, the thesis finds that the hearsay rules historical rationale has three aspects: concern with the inherent reliability of hearsay evidence, concern with procedural …

From Development As Disaster To Disaster As Development: Lessons From The Marseille Plague Of 1720, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Introduction: War Measures And The Repression Of Radicalism, 1914-1939, Barry Wright, Eric Tucker, Susan Binnie

Articles & Book Chapters

This fourth volume in the Canadian State Trials series, Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914–1939, brings readers to the period of the First World War and the inter-war years. it follows an approach similar to that of others in the series. the central concern remains the legal responses of Canadian governments to real and perceived threats to the security of the state. the aim is to provide a representative and relatively comprehensive examination of Canadian experiences with these matters, placed in broader historical and comparative context.

The Aboriginal Constitution, Brian Slattery

Brian Slattery

In a remarkable series of cases over the past decade, from Haida Nation to Manitoba Métis Federation, the Supreme Court of Canada has thrown a strong light on three basic elements of Aboriginal law: the honour of the Crown, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and Aboriginal Treaties. This paper argues that these form the framework of the Aboriginal Constitution, which parallels the Federal Pact between the Provinces in the Constitution Act, 1867. Indeed, the Aboriginal Constitution provides the Constitution of Canada with its most ancient and enduring roots.

Slow Violence, Law, And History, Doug Hay

All Papers

I read Rob Nixon’s engrossing and appalling book from the perspective of an historian who works on law. It opened to me an immense range of scholarship and activism of which I was only tangentially aware. But it also has themes that resonated, on almost every page, with things I study. Law certainly appears in the book. Here I want here to emphasize its importance to his argument, and to widen the discussion of chronologies.

A Story Of Marguerite: A Tale About Panis, Case Comment, And Social History, Signa A. Daum Shanks

Articles & Book Chapters

Those interested in social history contend that social norms deserve attention due to how they impact and are affected by historical events. This subfield has contributed significantly to how larger historical mosaics are understood, and how themes specific to marginalized groups are appreciated today. By presenting the story of enslaved Indigenous woman in New France who was the first Indigenous civil litigant in Canadian history, and focusing on her representation in the colonial legal system, a number of themes emerge. Canada’s history of slavery becomes better understood, and in so doing, a challenge to social historians is presented. By examining …

Paper Empires: The Legal Dimensions Of French And English Ventures In North America, Brian Slattery

Brian Slattery

No abstract provided.

Black Man, White Justice: The Extradition Of Matthew Bullock, An African-American Residing In Ontario, 1922, John C. Weaver

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Canadian extradition law uncomfortably combines common law precepts with compromises deemed necessary for carrying out treaty obligations. In this context, for example, the substitution of affidavits for parol evidence has been an area where international courtesy has clashed with a valued means of testing an allegation, namely the cross-examination of witnesses. To reject an application for extradition because only documentary evidence is provided can amount to a censure of judicial proceedings in the state making the request; rejection may suggest that a fair trial cannot be secured. In 1922, in a sensational but hitherto uncited case, an Ontario extradition judge …