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 Vaughan, author of a biography of Emmett Hall published by the Osgoode Society in 2004, puts Haldane’s Canadian decisions in the context both of Haldane’s life and thought and prior Canadian jurisprudence. Haldane’s education, his devotion to Hegelian philosophy, his work as a leading barrister, his various causes, especially education reform, and his service in the War Cabinet are all analysed, as are some intriguing personality quirks. What emerges is a picture of a complex and deeply principled jurist, and a better understanding of why we got the constitutional division of powers that we did.
