OSGOODE SOCIETY AWARDS. The Osgoode Society is very pleased to announce the 2020 winners of two of its awards.
Peter Oliver Prize. Named for the Society’s first and long-serving Editor-in-Chief, the Peter Oliver Prize is given for published work in Canadian legal history by a student. The 2020 winner is Jacqueline Briggs, a Ph.D. student in the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies, University of Toronto, for her article ‘Exemplary Punishment: T.R.L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous Executions, 1936-1952, published in the Canadian Historical Review. The article is a fascinating account of a legal aid programme for capitally-charged Indigenous defendants, the first publicly-funded legal aid programme in Canada.
The Hon. R. Roy McMurtry Fellowship in Canadian Legal History. Created on the occasion of his retirement as Chief Justice of Ontario, the McMurtry Fellowship honors Roy McMurtry’s contributions to Canadian Legal History as the founder and long-time President of the Osgoode Society. It supports a graduate or post-doctoral student working in the field of Canadian legal history.
This year the Society was able to award fellowships to its first choice and to two honourable mentions. The principal winner is Jean-Christophe Bédard-Rubin, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, who is writing an intellectual history of Ētienne Parent, a leading Quebec constitutional thinker in the immediate pre- and post-Confederation period.
Also McMurtry Fellows, as honourable mentions, are Michael Borsk and Krista Barclay. Michael Borsk is a Ph.D. student in history at Queen’s University. He is researching the history of ideas about private property and sovereignty in Ontario and Michigan in the first half of the nineteenth century. Krista Barclay received her PhD from the University of Manitoba and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is working on inheritance law in nineteenth-century British North America.
Congratulations to all our award winners. The winner of another Osgoode Society award, the John T. Saywell Prize in Canadian Constitutional Legal History, will be announced in August.