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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Limits Of Legal Evolution: Knowledge And Normativity In Theories Of Legal Change, Liam Mchugh-Russell
The Limits Of Legal Evolution: Knowledge And Normativity In Theories Of Legal Change, Liam Mchugh-Russell
PhD Dissertations
Over the last forty years, legal theory and policy advice have come to draw heavily from an ‘evolutionary’ jurisprudence that explains legal transformation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical successes of Darwinian natural selection. This project seeks to enrich and critique this tradition using an analytical perspective that emphasizes the material consequences of concepts and ideas. Existing theories of legal evolution depend on a positivist epistemology that strictly distinguishes the objects of social life — interests, institutions, systems — from knowledge about those objects. My dissertation explores how knowledge, and especially non-legal expertise, acts as an independent site and locus …
Law, Autonomy, And Local Government: A Legal History Of Municipal Corporations In Canada West/Ontario, 1850-1880, Mary Margaret Pelton Stokes
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 …