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

  • Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance

    By Professor Heidi Bohaker. The Osgoode Society is thrilled to announce that Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, by Professor Heidi Bohaker, has been awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s Prize for Best Book in Political History Prize. Congratulations to Professor Bohaker. Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance Through Alliance also won the Ontario Historical Society’s Joseph… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History

    By Carolyn Strange, University of Toronto Press. 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 in which the offender not only committed murder but did so at the same time as he (or she)… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870-1950

    Eric Reiter’s Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec,  has been named as a co-winner of the monograph prize from the Fondation du Barreau du Québec. The official notice can be found here: https://www.fondationdubarreau.qc.ca/decouvrez-les-laureats-du-concours-juridique-2021-et-les-regles-de-ledition-2022/. The Osgoode Society is thrilled to announce that Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec 1870-1950, by Professor Eric Reiter, has been awarded the Canadian Historical… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • Connecting the Dots: The Life of an Academic Lawyer

    By Professor Harry Arthurs. 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… Read more »

    Continue reading
  • 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 »

    Continue reading
  • 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 »

    Continue reading
  • 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 »

    Continue reading
  • 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 »

    Continue reading
  • 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 »

    Continue reading
  • 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 »

    Continue reading