Professor Richard Risk

Professor Richard Risk (1936-) provides a comprehensive account of his career at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law from 1962 to 1999, offering unique insights into the transformation of Canadian legal education. Born in Toronto and educated at Victoria College (BA 1956) and U of T Law (1959), Risk articled with his father’s firm before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard Law School (LLM 1961). His early teaching responsibilities included real property, personal property, and agency, while he developed expertise in administrative law and constitutional law.

Risk’s scholarly contributions centered on Canadian legal history, particularly after a transformative sabbatical with Willard Hurst at the University of Wisconsin in 1969. His influential four-part series on 19th-century Canadian law in the mid-1970s examined corporations, property rights, loss allocation, and contracts through a law-and-society lens. He also contributed to practical legal reform, drafting Ontario’s first Condominium Act (1968) and conducting work for the Law Reform Commission on land title registration.

The interview provides valuable perspective on the evolution of Canadian legal education from the 1960s through 1990s. Risk describes the shift from Caesar Wright and Bora Laskin’s traditional approach – focused on training lawyers through doctrine and legal skills – to a more interdisciplinary, university-based model emphasizing law as social science. He chronicles the influence of American legal scholarship, including critical legal studies and law-and-economics movements, and discusses demographic changes including the admission of women and increased student competitiveness. Risk’s observations on David Flaherty’s legal history workshops and the changing role of law professors from practitioners-who-teach to university-based scholars provide important insights into the professionalization of Canadian legal academia.

This description was written by AI and may contain some inaccuracies.