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The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754 – 2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle
2004 
edited by Philip Girard, Professor, Dalhousie Law School, Jim Phillips, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and Barry Cahill, independent scholar. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 2004.
This volume was prepared to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Canada’s oldest surviving common law court. The thirteen essays include an account of the first meeting of the court in Michaelmas Term (October) 1754 and surveys of the court’s jurisprudence. There are also chapters on the courts of Westminister Hall, on which the Supreme Court was modelled in the eighteenth century, and on the courthouses occupied over the two and a half centuries of the court’s existence. Anchoring the volume are two longer chapters, one on the pre-confederation and one on the modern period, which together provide a comprehensive narrative history of the court – a unique contribution to our knowledge of the history of Canadian provincial superior courts.
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Contents
Contents
FOREWORD vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
CONTRIBUTORS xi
ABBREVIATIONS xiii
MAPS xiv
Part 1: Introduction
1 Introduction
PHILIP GIRARD AND JIM PHILLIPS 3
2 Origins: The Courts of Westminster Hall in the Eighteenth
Century
DOUGLAS HAY 13
3 Colonial and Imperial Contexts
ELIZABETH MANCKE 30
Part 2: Overviews
4 The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia: Origins to Confederation
BARRY CAHILL AND JIM PHILLIPS 53
5 The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia: Confederation to the
Twenty-First Century
PHILIP GIRARD 140
6 A Collective Biography of the Supreme Court Judiciary of Nova Scotia, 1900-2000
R. BLAKE BROWN AND SUSAN S. JONES 204
7 Halifax Homes of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court
BRIAN CUTHBERTSON 243
Part 3: Case Studies
8 Michaelmas Term, 1754: The Supreme Court’s First Session
JAMES MUIR AND JIM PHILLIPS 259
9 Women as Litigants before the Supreme Court of
Nova Scotia, 1754-1830
JULIAN GWYN 294
10 Her Majesty’s Yankees: American Authority in the
Supreme Court of Victorian Nova Scotia, 1837-1901
BERNARD J. HIBBITTS 321
11 Instrumentalism and the Law of Injuries in Nineteenth-
Century Nova Scotia
JAMES MUIR 361
12 Confederation, Adjudicative Culture, and the Law of the
Constitution: The Late Nineteenth-Century Persistence
of Local Autonomy in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court
WILLIAM LAHEY 392
13 ‘To Err Is Human, to Forgive Divine’: The Labour Relations
Board and the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1947-1965
R. BLAKE BROWN 449
APPENDI X: The Records of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court
JIM PHILLIPS AND JOHN MACLEOD 491
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 503
INDEX 507
Reviews
A collection of scholarly essays that offers the first comprehensive history of the oldest superior court in Canada... The result is a warts-and-all approach that provides valuable insights into an institution that affects the lives of every Nova Scotian. Dean Jobb, The Sunday Herald (Halifax, NS), 24 October 2004, p. S13.
An admirable contribution to Canadian legal historical literature, This collection illustrates how focused treatment of a court ... can generate an historiography of considerable importance. David Bell, Canadian Historical Review, Vol 87, 2006, p. 150.
This book is a remarkable tribute to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. It is a collection of essays that succeeds well at that most challenging of tasks, drawing diverse scholarship together thematically into a digestible whole… The least satisfactory aspect of reviewing a book like this is being entirely unable to do justice to the impressive depth of the research, to the details unearthed by these scholars on the challenges to the court's everyday functioning, to its crises, to the complex interplay of personal, educational, social and jurisprudential influences on the judges, to the jurisprudence they developed in the multiplicity of cases they dealt with over 250 years…. This book will reward … those who are interested in more broad, thematic questions about courts and their development in the colonial and post-colonial context, particularly in the place that has become Canada, with all its diverse influences and homegrown propensities. Lyndsay Campbell, Law and History Review, Vol 25, 2007, p. 448.
Allan Dunlop, Journal of Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol 8, 2005, p. 148.
Jean-Philippe Garneau, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences, June 2005.
Gilles Renaud, Canadian Criminal Law Review, Vol 10, 2006, p. 205.
Reference and Research Book News, Vol 20, 2005.
