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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The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History
In 2020 we are also publishing The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History, by Professor Carolyn Strange of the Australian National University in Canberra. This major study of the operation of the death penalty focusses on the disposition by executive review of all cases between Confederation and the abolition of the death penalty… Read more »
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Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance
Our members book for 2020 is Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, by Heidi Bohaker, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto and published by the University of Toronto Press. While Canada’s constitution protects Indigenous treaty rights, Canadians know much less about the legal traditions of Indigenous nations and the ways in which these different… Read more »
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Connecting the Dots: The Life of an Academic Lawyer
Professor Harry Arthurs has been a centrally important figure in Canadian legal education for more than fifty years. He came to national prominence as a legal scholar and educator with his seminal writing in the 1960s and 1970s on labour law. In the 1970s he was Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, and in 1983… Read more »
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Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870-1950
By Eric Reiter. Published by the University of Toronto Press. Wounded Feelings analyses the law and litigation involving defamation, breach of promise of marriage, personality rights, and religious beliefs. These were all areas of ‘emotion’ in which Quebecers – lawyers and judges as well as litigants – dealt with the intersection between the subjective world… Read more »
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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 »