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.

Biographies

  • Fulfilment: Memoirs of a Criminal Court Judge

    by David Vanek. Published with Dundurn Press, 1999. We are very grateful to Judge David Vanek for offering us the opportunity to publish his memoirs. In Ontario provincial court judges are the workhorses of the judiciary, carrying out a huge range of tasks and bearing an enormous burden. Most students of Canadian legal history are familiar… Read more »

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  • Chief Justice W.R. Jackett: By the Law of the Land

    by Richard W. Pound. Published with McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. When Richard Pound told us he was working on a biography of Wilbur Jackett, former Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Canada, and asked us to consider publication, we were pleased and somewhat sceptical. We had recently published Ian Bushnell’s history of the Federal Court… Read more »

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  • Northern Justice: The Memoirs Of Mr. Justice William G. Morrow

    edited by William Morrow. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 1995. One of the first Canadians to champion the legal and cultural cause of the North’s indigenous peoples, William George Morrow, the senior partner in an eminent Edmonton law firm, seized the opportunity to go to the North in 1960, and act as a volunteer… Read more »

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  • Just Lawyers: Seven Portraits

    by David Ricardo Williams. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 1995. In 1924 Mackenzie King, on bended knee, pleaded with lawyer, Eugene Lafleur to accept the chief justiceship of Canada, but Lafleur refused. Another lawyer, Gordon Henderson was offered an appointment to the Ontario Court of Appeal but rejected it. Lafleur, Henderson, Frank Covert, Aimé… Read more »

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  • A Passion for Justice: The Legacy of James Chalmers McRuer

    by Patrick Boyer. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 1994. Patrick Boyer’s portrait of James Chalmers McRuer (1890-1985) reveals the complexities of one of Canada’s outstanding jurists, and shows the character and personal dilemmas of the man who was arguably Canada’s greatest law reformer. McRuer’s career of more than fifty years included periods as a… Read more »

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  • The Life And Times Of Arthur Maloney: The Last Of The Tribunes

    by Charles Pullen. Published with Dundurn Press Ltd, 1994. Out of Print. Arthur Maloney was a charmingly complicated and skilled man who came out of the Ottawa Valley determined to make something of himself as other members of his family had done before him. By the time he died in 1984 he had been a successful… Read more »

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  • Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact

    by Patrick Brode, Legal Counsel, City of Windsor. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 1984. It is appropriate that Patrick Brode’s biography of Sir John Beverley Robinson was published in the year that marked the 200th anniversary of the coming of the loyalists to British North America. Robinson, as Patrick Brode demonstrates, embodied much… Read more »

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  • Duff: A Life in the Law

    by David Williams. Published with the University of British Columbia Press, 1984. Out of Print. Sir Lyman Duff is often described as Canada’s most distinguished jurist. His career encompassed forty years in high judicial office, the last eleven as Chief Justice of Canada. More than any other individual, he shaped the Supreme Court and its decisions… Read more »

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