Osgoode Society Books
Our books are listed here chronologically by date of publication, with the books to be published in 2018 first. The 2018 books will be available in the fall. You can order them now using the membership page. Use the Search function to the right to find a particular book, or author.
All Books
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A History of Law in Canada Volume 1: Beginnings to 1866
By Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, and Blake Brown. Published by the University of Toronto Press. This book, the first of 2 volumes, presents the history of law in what is now Canada, from the first European contacts with northern North America in the very early sixteenth century to immediately before Confederation. Divided into four parts,… Read more »
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The Class Actions Controversy: The Origins and Development of the Ontario Class Proceedings Act
By Suzanne Chiodo. Published by Irwin Law. This book is a historical study of class actions in Ontario, from the origins of representative proceedings in equity, to the rise of modern-day class actions around the world (particularly in the US and Québec), to the debate and passage of class proceedings legislation in Ontario. This is… Read more »
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Claire L’Heureux-Dubé: A Life
By Constance Backhouse. Published by the University of British Columbia Press. Claire L’Heureux-Dubé was the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, in 1987, and the first from Quebec. This deeply-researched biography takes us through the judge’s origins and life in the Quebec of the 1920s to the present, and its portrait of… Read more »
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An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919-1936
By Dennis G. Molinaro, Published by the University of Toronto Press. Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada was passed in 1919 following the Winnipeg general strike as a law aimed at ‘unlawful associations.’ Its very broad definition of unlawful association meant that it could be used against a wide variety of opponents of the status… Read more »
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Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border, 1819-1914
By Bradley Miller, Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, published by the University of Toronto Press. This is the first comprehensive history of cross-border Canadian-American interactions in relation to fugitive criminals, escaped slaves, and refugees. Miller examines the complexity of those interactions, which involved formal legal regimes governed by treaties as well… Read more »
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Law, Debt and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of Eighteenth-Century Halifax
By James Muir, Professor of Law and History, University of Alberta, published by the University of Toronto Press. This is a path-breaking study of the every day work of civil law and civil courts. It examines the type of litigation pursued (mostly debt), how the courts worked, and how the economy operated in a society… Read more »
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A History of Adoption Law in Ontario, 1921-2015
By Lori Chambers, Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Lakehead University, published by the University of Toronto Press. Professor Chambers’ book traces the history of adoption law in Ontario from 1921, when the first Adoption Act was passed, to the present. She details the origins and passage of that legislation and then examines a series… Read more »
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Security, Dissent and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace: Canadian State Trials Volume IV, 1914-1939
Edited by Barry Wright, Department of Law, Carleton University, Eric Tucker, Osgoode Hall Law School, and Susan Binnie, Independent Historian, published by the University of Toronto Press. This latest collection in our State Trials series, the fourth, looks at the legal issues raised by the repression of dissent from the outset of World War One… Read more »
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“Honorary Protestants”: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997
By David Fraser, Professor of Law, University of Nottingham, published by the University of Toronto Press. Section 93 of the Constitution Act 1867 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to anybody else. This study of the challenges, legal and otherwise, encountered by Jewish parents in educating their children in… Read more »
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Law, Life and Government at Red River
By Dale Gibson, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Manitoba. The General Quarterly Court of Assiniboia can justly be called the first ‘British’ court in western Canada. Although there were predecessor institutions and judicial arrangements for hearing criminal and civil cases, the establishment of the Quarterly Court in the 1830s put the administration of justice… Read more »