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

  • The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays

    edited by Barrington Walker, Professor, Department of History, Queens University. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2012. One of the central themes of the new legal history of the past two decades has been exploration of the law’s role in shaping the lives and experiences of historically marginalised groups in our society. The Osgoode… Read more »

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  • Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society

    by Lesley Erickson, Independent Historian and Researcher, Vancouver. Published with  UBC Press, 2011. The history of crime and punishment is one of the principal lenses through which historians of the law investigate the relationship between the law in the books and the ‘law in action,’ and the uses of law to regulate relations among social… Read more »

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  • The Lazier Murder: Prince Edward County, 1884

    by Robert J. Sharpe, Justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2011. Robert Sharpe is one of the Osgoode Society’s most prolific authors, and his latest offering is a compelling account of a late nineteenth century murder case in Picton, Ontario.  This very thoroughly researched and engagingly… Read more »

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  • Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax

    by Philip Girard, Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. Published with University of Toronto Press, 2011. Well known to Osgoode Society readers as the author of an award winning biography of Bora Laskin, Philip Girard’s  Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax is much more than a biography of… Read more »

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  • Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial

    by John McLaren, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Victoria. Published with University of Toronto Press, 2011. Canada was but one part of a large and complex empire, and this book is a reminder of that fact and a fascinating exploration of one important aspect of the legal history of the empire – the role of… Read more »

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  • Work on Trial: Canadian Labour Law Struggles

    edited by Judy Fudge, Lansdowne Professor of Law, University of Victoria, and Eric Tucker, Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School. Published with Irwin Law, 2010. The world of work, so important to individuals’ economic well-being and to their sense of self, has been fundamentally shaped by law, both collective bargaining law and individual employment law…. Read more »

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  • Viscount Haldane: "The Wicked Stepfather of the Canadian Constitution"

    by Frederick Vaughan, Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2010. Lord Haldane is well-known to historians of Canadian constitutional law as one of the Privy Council judges most responsible for re-shaping the division of powers in the direction of greater provincial power after World War One. This deeply-researched biography Fred… Read more »

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  • Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858-1958

    by Barrington Walker, Professor of History, Queen’s University. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2010. In recent years legal historians have been increasingly interested in the social history of the law and in the law’s impact on, among many other social phenomena, race relations. This ground-breaking study investigates the relationship between Ontario’s black community and… Read more »

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  • The British Columbia Court of Appeal: The first hundred years

    by Christopher Moore, Independent Historian. Published with the University of British Columbia Press, 2010. The Court of Appeal of British Columbia began sitting in 1910, and this volume thus coincides with the court’s centenary. Renowned historian Christopher Moore has produced a masterful account of the court, one that combines narrative, biographical and analytical histories of a… Read more »

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  • The Last Day, the Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial

    by Robert J. Sharpe, Justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2009 (first edition published by Carswells, 1988). The Osgoode Society first published Robert Sharpe’s study of the libel action launched by Sir Arthur Currie in 1988, sixty years after the case itself had captured the attention of the… Read more »

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