The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers, 1797-1997


Book Description

It is an authoritative and lively history of the Law Society of Upper Canada and of Ontario's lawyers, from the founding of the Society by ten lawyers in 1797, to the crises which shook the society and the legal profession in the mid-1990s.




The African Canadian Legal Odyssey


Book Description

The African Canadian Legal Odyssey explores the history of African Canadians and the law from the era of slavery until the early twenty-first century. This collection demonstrates that the social history of Blacks in Canada has always been inextricably bound to questions of law, and that the role of the law in shaping Black life was often ambiguous and shifted over time. Comprised of eleven engaging chapters, organized both thematically and chronologically, it includes a substantive introduction that provides a synthesis and overview of this complex history. This outstanding collection will appeal to both advanced specialists and undergraduate students and makes an important contribution to an emerging field of scholarly inquiry.




Lawyers and the Rule of Law


Book Description

This book examines lawyers' contributions to creating and maintaining the rule of law, one of the pillars of a liberal democracy. It moves from the European Enlightenment to the modern day, exploring the role of judges, government lawyers, and private practitioners in creating, defining, and being defined by, the demands of modern society. The book is divided into 4 parts representing the big themes. The first part considers lawyers' contribution to the growth of constitutionalism, the second, the formulation of roles and identities, and the third the formation of values. The fourth part focuses on the challenges faced by lawyers and the rule of law in the past 50 years, the neoliberal period, and how they challenge both conceptions of lawyers and the rule of law. Each part is illustrated by defining events, from the execution of Charles I, through the Nuremberg Trials, to the insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump in January 2021. Although the focus is on England and Wales, parallel developments in other jurisdictions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA, are considered. This allows analysis of lawyers' historical and contemporary engagement with the rule of law in jurisdictional systems based on the Common Law. Each chapter is thematic, but the passage through the book is broadly chronological.




Lawyers and Vampires


Book Description

Analyses aspects of the cultural history of the legal profession in England, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Finland. It examines ways in which lawyers were imaginatively and institutionally constructed, and their larger cultural significance.




Lawyers’ Empire


Book Description

Approaching the legal profession through the lens of cultural history, Wes Pue explores the social roles lawyers imagined for themselves in England and its expanding empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on a critical moment when lawyers – whether leaders or rebels – sought to reshape their profession. In the process, they often fancied they were also shaping the culture and politics of both nation and empire as they struggled to develop or adapt professional structures, represent clients, or engage in advocacy. As an exploration of the relationship between legal professionals and liberalism at home or in the Empire, this work draws attention to recurrent disagreements as to how lawyers have best assured their own economic well-being while simultaneously advancing the causes of liberty, cultural authority, stability, and continuity.




Renegade Lawyer


Book Description

Though Cohen rose to the top of his profession, he had a difficult, complex private life that contributed to his personal disgrace and professional downfall.




Quiet Rebels


Book Description

“It’s a girl!” the Ontario press announced, as Canada’s first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers for the next six decades, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession. Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers called to the bar from 1897 to 1957, revealing the legal profession’s gendered patterns. Comprising a small handful of students—or even a single student—at the Law School, women were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, Black, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades. This longitudinal study of women lawyers’ gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created—or foreclosed on—women lawyers’ professional success. The book’s final section explores how some current women lawyers, despite their increased numbers, must remain “quiet rebels” to succeed.




The Heiress Vs the Establishment


Book Description

In 1922, Elizabeth Bethune Campbell, a Toronto-born socialite, unearthed what she initially thought was an unsigned copy of her mother's will, designating her as the primary beneficiary of the estate. The discovery snowballed into a fourteen-year-battle with the Ontario legal establishment, as Mrs. Campbell attempted to prove that her uncle, a prominent member of Ontario's legal circle, had stolen funds from her mother's estate. In 1930, she argued her case before the Law Lords of the Privy Council in London. A non-lawyer and Canadian, with no formal education or legal training, Campbell was the first woman to ever appear before them. She won. Reprinted here in its entirety, Campbell's self-published account of her campaign, Where Angels Fear to Tread, is an eloquent first-person view of intrigue and overlapping spheres of influence in the early-twentieth-century legal system. Constance Backhouse and Nancy Backhouse provide extensive commentary and annotations to lluminate the context and pick up the narrative where Campbell's book leaves off. Vibrantly written, this is an enthralling read. Not only a fascinating social and legal history, it's also a very good story.




Tracings of Gerald Le Dain's Life in the Law


Book Description

Gerald Le Dain (1924–2007) was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1984. This collectively written biography traces fifty years of his steady, creative, and conciliatory involvement with military service, the legal academy, legislative reform, university administration, and judicial decision-making. This book assembles contributions from the in-house historian of the law firm where Le Dain first practised, from students and colleagues in the law schools where he taught, from a research associate in his Commission of Inquiry into the non-medical use of drugs, from two of his successors on the Federal Court of Appeal, and from three judicial clerks to Le Dain at the Supreme Court of Canada. Also reproduced here is a transcript of a recent CBC documentary about his 1988 forced resignation from the Supreme Court following a short-term depressive illness, with commentary from Le Dain’s family and co-workers. Gerald Le Dain was a tireless worker and a highly respected judge. In a series of essays that cover the different periods and dimensions of his career, Tracings of Gerald Le Dain’s Life in the Law is an important and compassionate account of one man's commitment to the law in Canada. Contributors include Harry W. Arthurs, G. Blaine Baker, Bonnie Brown, Rosemary Cairns-Way, John M. Evans, Melvyn Green, Bernard J. Hibbitts, Peter W. Hogg, Richard A. Janda, C. Ian Kyer, Andree Lajoie, Gerald E. Le Dain, Allen M. Linden, Roderick A. Macdonald, Louise Rolland, and Stephen A. Scott.




Professional Autonomy and the Public Interest


Book Description

Formed in 1825, the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society is the second-oldest law society in common-law Canada, after the Law Society of Ontario. Yet despite its founders' ambitions, it did not become the regulator of the legal profession in Nova Scotia for nearly seventy-five years. In this institutional history of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society from its inception to the Legal Profession Act of 2005, Barry Cahill provides a chronological exploration of the profession's regulation in Nova Scotia and the critical role of the society. Based on extensive research conducted on internal documents, legislative records, and legal and general-interest periodicals and newspapers, Professional Autonomy and the Public Interest demonstrates that the inauguration of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society was the first giant step on the long road to self-regulation. Highlighting the inherent tensions between protection of professional self-interest and protection of the larger public interest, Cahill explains that while this radical innovation was opposed by both lawyers and judges, it was ultimately imposed by the Liberal government in 1899. In light of emerging models of regulation in the twenty-first century, Professional Autonomy and the Public Interest is a timely look back at the origins of professional regulatory bodies and the evolution of law affecting the legal profession in Atlantic Canada.