The late Professor John Tupper (Jack) Saywell was one of Canada’s most distinguished political historians. He began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1954, and was Editor of the Canadian Historical Review (1957 – 1963), and of the Canadian Annual Review (1960 – 1979). He was the author of The Office of Lieutenant-Governor: A Study in Canadian Government and Politics, which won the Delancey K. Jay Prize at Harvard University. His ‘Just Call Me Mitch’: The Life of Mitchell F. Hepburn (1991) won the Floyd Chalmers Award for the best book on Ontario history. He also wrote close to a dozen textbooks on Canadian history for schoolchildren. He became York University’s Founding Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science in 1964, and from 1987 to 1998 was Director of the Graduate Program in History at York. His students commemorated his career with Framing Canadian Federalism: Historical Essays in Honour of John T. Saywell (2009). In 2009 his colleagues, students and friends endowed the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Legal History, administered by the Osgoode Society. His partly autobiographical account of York’s early years, Someone to Teach Them: York and the Great University Explosion 1960-1973 , was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2008.
Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Books
Essays in the History of Canadian Law Volume 10: A Tribute to Peter Oliver (2008), editor with Jim Phillips and R. Roy McMurtry.
The Law Makers: Judicial Power and the Shaping of Canadian Federalism (2002).
Chapters in Osgoode Society Books
“Introduction: Peter Oliver and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History,” in J. Phillips, R.R. McMurtry and J. Saywell, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law Volume 10: A Tribute to Peter Oliver (2008), pp. 1-30.
Other Legal History Publications
The Office of Lieutenant-Governor: A Study in Canadian Government and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 1957)