Prize Winners announced at Osgoode Society AGM

This evening at the Osgoode Society's annual general meeting, three prizes were awarded.

For the Peter Oliver Prize for the best published writing by a student, we have co-winners.

Edward Cavanagh is a PhD student in history at the University of Ottawa and a former McMurtry Fellow.  Tyler Wentzell graduated in 2014 from the University of Toronto Law School.

The articles for which they were awarded the prize are:

Edward Cavanagh,  ‘Possession and Dispossession in Corporate New France, 1600-1663: Debunking a “Juridical History” and Revisiting Terra Nullius,’ 2014 32 Law and History Review 97

Tyler Wentzell, ‘The Court and the Cataracts:  The Creation of the Queen Victoria Niagara Falls Park and the Ontario Court of Appeal,’ (2014) 106 Ontario History 100

The R. Roy McMurtry Fellowship in Canadian Legal History was awarded to Elizabeth Koester.  

Elizabeth holds an LLB from the University of Toronto and was a partner with McCarthys for some years.  She has returned to academe and is pursuing a doctorate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation will focus on law and eugenics in Ontario, 1900-1939.

Finally, the winner of the John T. Saywell Prize in Constitutional Legal History (awarded in alternate years) is Hakeem O. Yusuf, Reader in Law and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde Glasgow, for his book Colonial and Post-Colonial Constitutionalism in the Commonwealth:  Peace, Order and Good Government, published by Routledge last year. Dr. Yusuf considers the interpretation of and experience with POGG in Canada, Australia, Nigeria and the UK itself, but the Canadian experience is in many ways the heart of the book.  By putting POGG into a broader imperial context, Dr. Yusuf has brought new insights to a topic that Canadian legal and constitutional historians have studied almost obsessively.  

Congratulations to all four prize winners.