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.
Judges
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Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial
by John Mclaren, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Victoria. Published with University of Toronto Press, 2011. Canada was but one part of a large and complex empire, and this book is a reminder of that fact and a fascinating exploration of one important aspect of the legal history of the empire – the role of… 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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Canadian Maverick: The Life of Ivan C. Rand
by William Kaplan. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2009. Ivan Rand had a long, varied and remarkable career. He is best known for his Supreme Court of Canada judgments in a series of cases emanating from Quebec in the 1950s and dealing with civil rights, cases which established limits on the government’s ability to… Read more »
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The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies
edited by Hamar Foster, Professor of Law, University of Victoria, Andrew Buck, Professor of Law, Australian Catholic University, Queensland, and Ben Berger, Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School. Published with the University of British Columbia Press, 2008. In recent years Canadian legal historians have shown an increasing interest in imperial themes and the comparative legal… Read more »
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The Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba 1870-1950: A Biographical History
by Dale Brawn, Professor, Department of Law & Justice, Laurentian University. Published wth the University of Toronto Press, 2006. This study of the Manitoba judiciary is the first complete biographical history of a provincial bench. The relative youth of Manitoba and the small size of its legal profession makes possible an exceptionally detailed investigation of the… Read more »
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Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life
by Philip Girard, Professor of Law, History & Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University, 2005. Published with the University of Toronto Press. In any account of Canadian law in the 20th century, Bora Laskin looms large. This biography explores in vivid detail the life and times of a restless man on a mission. In his first career,… Read more »
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Aggressive in Pursuit: The Life of Justice Emmett Hall
by Frederick Vaughan, formerly of the Political Science Department, University of Guelph. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2004. In 1963 Prime Minister John Diefenbaker elevated Chief Justice Hall of Saskatchewan to the Supreme Court of Canada. This judicial biography focuses on Hall’s career as defence lawyer, and civil litigator, his position as a civil… Read more »
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The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754 – 2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle
edited by Philip Girard, Professor, Dalhousie Law School, Jim Phillips, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and Barry Cahill, independent scholar. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2004. This volume was prepared to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Canada’s oldest surviving common law court. The thirteen… Read more »
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Brian Dickson: A Judge’s Journey
by Robert Sharpe, Justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and Professor Kent Roach, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2003. After coming of age during the Depression on the Prairies, being severely wounded in World War II, and after a career as a successful and prosperous… Read more »
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The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison, 1856-1878
edited with an introduction by Peter N. Oliver, Professor of History, York University. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2003. Between 1856 and 1878, the year of his death, Robert A. Harrison, a Toronto lawyer, often described as the outstanding common law lawyer of his generation in Canada and Chief Justice of Ontario in the… Read more »