New from Osgoode Society and UTP: Muir, Law, Debt and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of Eighteenth Century Halifax

New from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the U of T Press.

James Muir of the University of Alberta has just published Law Debt and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of Eighteenth Century Halifax.

Here's what the Osgoode Society website has to say:


This is a path-breaking study of the every day work of civil law and civil courts. It examines the type of litigation pursued (mostly debt), how the courts worked, and how the economy operated in a society with very little cash and in which credit was the lifeblood of commerce. Muir employs both quantitative and qualitative analyses of all extant case files and explains how eighteenth-century court procedure worked. He situates his study against the society and economy of Halifax, analyzing who sued who and why and how the legal system fit into patterns of economic relations and activity.