Osgoode Society Books
Our books are listed here chronologically by date of publication. Use the Search function to the right to find a particular book, or author.
MEMBERS’ BOOK 2020
Our members’ book for 2020 is Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinabe Governance through Alliance, by Heidi Bohaker, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto and published by the University of Toronto Press. While Canada’s constitution protects Indigenous treaty rights, Canadians know much less about the legal traditions of Indigenous nations and the ways in which these different traditions informed treaties made between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. This volume is a ground-breaking exploration of one Indigenous legal tradition. In it, the author explains how a uniquely Anishinaabe category of kinship, the doodem, structured governance and law as practiced in formal councils (referred to metaphorically as fires) through the practice of alliance formation. Such alliances created relationships of interdependence, which were renewed through the exchange of gifts in council. The records of early Canadian treaties, Bohaker argues, are to be found in the records of gifts exchanged to create these alliances between council fires; the Anishinaabe treated the French, and later the British, as if their governments were council fires also. In return, colonial officials adhered to Indigenous law when they entered into treaties. Bohaker weaves together a voluminous amount of research from both Anishinaabe and European sources, including archival documents and material culture from institutions in Canada, Britain and France, to describe the continuities and changes in Anishinaabe governance and law until settler colonial law (the Indian Act) replaced traditional governance with elected band councils.
OPTIONAL EXTRA 2020
In 2020 we are also publishing The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History, by Professor Carolyn Strange of the Australian National University in Canberra. This major study of the operation of the death penalty focusses on the disposition by executive review of all cases between Confederation and the abolition of the death penalty in which the offender not only committed murder but did so at the same time as he (or she) also committed a serious sexual offence. Professor Strange is able to show that such offenders fared much less well in the commutation process than other people convicted of murder and sentenced to death. As importantly, she divides the overall narrative into six periods, showing that within each period political, administrative and public consideration of the cases were conducted against a background of other concerns, ranging from the ‘danger’ of immigrants to the rise of psychiatric concern with such offenders to the abolition movement of the 1960s.
Constitutional Law
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A Thirty Years War: The Failed Public/Private Partnership that Spurred the Creation of the Toronto Transit Commission, 1891-1921
by Ian Kyer, Independent Historian. Published by Irwin Law. The thirty year franchise granted by the City of Toronto to the privately owned Toronto Railway Company in 1891 brought the City a modern electric streetcar system. But the city and its private sector transit provider never learned to work together. Their relationship was marred… Read more »
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“Honorary Protestants”: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997
By David Fraser, Professor of Law, University of Nottingham, published by the University of Toronto Press. Section 93 of the Constitution Act 1867 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to anybody else. This study of the challenges, legal and otherwise, encountered by Jewish parents in educating their children in… Read more »
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Viscount Haldane: "The Wicked Stepfather of the Canadian Constitution"
by Frederick Vaughan, Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2010. Lord Haldane is well-known to historians of Canadian constitutional law as one of the Privy Council judges most responsible for re-shaping the division of powers in the direction of greater provincial power after World War One. This deeply-researched biography Fred… Read more »
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The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood
by Mr. Justice Robert Sharpe of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and Patricia McMahon, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2007. The Persons’ Case is one of the best known Canadian constitutional cases, both for the fact that it declared women to be ‘persons’ for the purposes of eligibility… Read more »
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R.C.B. Risk, A History of Canadian Legal Thought: Collected Essays
edited by G.Blaine Baker, Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University, and Jim Phillips, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2006. Frank Scott, Bora Laskin, W.P.M. Kennedy, John Wills and Edward Blake are among the better known figures whose thinking and writing about law are featured in this collection…. Read more »
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The Law Makers: Judicial Power and the Shaping of Canadian Federalism
by John T. Saywell, Emeritus Professor of History, York University. Published with University of Toronto Press, 2002. For those who believe that the history of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s decisions on the Canadian constitution is an oft-told story, this book will be a revelation indeed. One of Canada’s outstanding scholars, Professor Saywell draws… Read more »