edited by Jim Phillips, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and Philip Girard, Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 1990.
An introduction by the editors is followed by ten essays grouped into four main areas of study. The first is the legal system as a whole: essays in this section discuss the judicial failure of the Annapolis regime, present a collective biography of the province’s superior court judiciary to 1900, and examine the property rights of married women in the nineteenth century. The second section deals with criminal law. Its essays explore vagrancy laws in Halifax in the late nineteenth century, aspects of prisons and punishments before 1880, and female petty crime in Halifax between 1864 and 1890.The third, on family law, examines the issues of divorce from 1750 to 1890 and child custody from 1866 to 1910. Finally, two essays relate to law and the economy: one examines the Mines Arbitration Act of 1888; the other considers the question of private property and public resources in the context of the administrative control of water in Nova Scotia.
