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.
All Books
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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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Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858-1958
by Barrington Walker, Professor of History, Queen’s University. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2010. In recent years legal historians have been increasingly interested in the social history of the law and in the law’s impact on, among many other social phenomena, race relations. This ground-breaking study investigates the relationship between Ontario’s black community and… Read more »
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The British Columbia Court of Appeal: The first hundred years
by Christopher Moore, Independent Historian. Published with the University of British Columbia Press, 2010. The Court of Appeal of British Columbia began sitting in 1910, and this volume thus coincides with the court’s centenary. Renowned historian Christopher Moore has produced a masterful account of the court, one that combines narrative, biographical and analytical histories of a… Read more »
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The Last Day, the Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial
by Robert J. Sharpe, Justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2009 (first edition published by Carswells, 1988). The Osgoode Society first published Robert Sharpe’s study of the libel action launched by Sir Arthur Currie in 1988, sixty years after the case itself had captured the attention of the… Read more »
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Canadian State Trials Volume III: Political Trials and Security Measures, 1840-1914
edited by Barry Wright, Department of Law, Carleton University, and Dr. Susan Binnie. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2009. This third volume of the Osgoode Society’s Canadian State Trials series covers the period from the 1840s to the First World War. It examines a range of political trials as traditionally defined, including those arising… 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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A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth Century Canada
by R. Blake Brown, Professor of History, St Mary’s University. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2009. The jury has long been a central institution of both the trial process in particular and of the ideology of the common law in general, a body exemplifying the distinctiveness of our legal tradition. In this first book-length… Read more »
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The Law of the Land: The Advent of the Torrens System in Canada
by Greg Taylor, Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2008. The Torrens system of land titles registration was introduced to what is now British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, and later spread to the rest of western Canada and to Ontario. In telling the story of the various… 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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Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume X: A Tribute to Peter N. Oliver
edited by Jim Phillips, Professor of Law, University of Toronto, R.Roy McMurtry, President of the Osgoode Society, and John Saywell, Professor of History Emeritus, York University. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2008. This collection of Canadian legal history essays honours Professor Peter Oliver, who led the Osgoode Society as editor-in-chief from its establishment… Read more »