In this podcast, Greg Marchildon interviews Osgoode Society Associate Editor Philip Girard regarding A History of Law in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1866, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2018, of which he is the co-author along with Jim Phillips and Blake Brown. Girard explains the ways in which Canadian legal culture historically draws upon Indigenous, French and British legal traditions. He also discusses the historical pathways that led to the legal pluralism that so marks the development of law in Canada. Philip Girard is one of Canada’s most accomplished legal historians and is currently a law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. Among his many other books is his outstanding biography of Supreme Court of Canada Justice Bora Laskin for which the Champlain Society awarded him the Floyd S. Chalmers Award.
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