Welcome to the Canadian Legal History Blog!
January 11 - Paul Craven, York University: "Low Crimes and Misdemeanours."Meetings take place in Flavelle House, U of T (Museum subway stop), at 6:30 p.m. If you aren't on the distribution list and would like to be, please email j.phillips@utoronto.ca.
January 25 - Marisha Caswell, Queen's University: "Married Women and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England"
February 1- Douglas Hay, York University: "The Misdemeanour/Felony Distinction in the 18th and 19th centuries."
February 15 - Jed Shugerman, Harvard University: "The Origins of the US Department of Justice"
February 29 - Li Chen, University of Toronto: "Legal Knowledge and Justice in Late Imperial China, 1651-1911
March 14 - Coel Kirkby, Cambridge University: "The Imperial Origins of the Canadian Constitution."
March 28 - Michael Kogan, University of Toronto: "Soviet Legal Professionals and the Administration of Justice, 1945-1953".
April 11 - Jeff McNairn, Queen's University: "A Just and Obvious Distinction: The Meaning of Imprisonment for Debt and the Criminal Law in Upper Canada's Age of Reform"
North-West Transportation Co. Ltd. v. Beatty (1887), 12 App. Cas. 589 (P.C.) is well known throughout the Commonwealth as a foundational decision regarding the ability of corporate directors to contract with their own corporation, and in particular their ability to vote as shareholders for the approval of such conflict-affected contracts. The background to the case reveals a young nation in which enormous numbers of immigrants were seeking to start new lives on the western prairies. Before the trans-Canada railroad was completed in 1885, and long before a full road network was in place, shipping lines on the Great Lakes provided the only feasible way to reach the continental interior (the “North-West”).
The dispute in Beatty was about a contract by which one of the directors of a company, who was also its majority shareholder, sold a steamship to the company over the objections of minority shareholders. In giving its advice, the Privy Council arguably misunderstood the nature of the corporate entity involved in the case, and produced a solution that has puzzled and divided commentators and legislators ever since.
This paper traces the story of the Beattys and their influence in late-19th century Canada, and examines how the dispute arose and how it was resolved by four levels of courts. It goes on to assess the decision against the principles of corporate and fiduciary law, and to show how Canadian legislators have reacted against the Privy Council's decision with the result that in modern Canadian law, shareholder approval is often necessary for certain corporate decisions, but it is never sufficient to insulate such decisions from judicial review.
It has been almost 50 years since Joseph Schacht and Noel Coulson published their respective introductions to Islamic law. Both works have served as standard introductions to Islamic law to countless students ever since. The last generation of Islamic law scholarship, however, beginning in the 1980s, has produced a body of research that systematically surpassed the contents of both these books without, however, producing a new introductory survey to the topic. This gap in scholarship left the teacher of Islamic law in somewhat of a bind: the most accessible introductions to his subject did not reflect the current state of research, but current scholarship had not produced a suitable work that could replace either Coulson or Schacht. Wael Hallaq, in his work, "Shari'a: Theory, Practice, Transformations," attempts to fill this gap in the literature. This review essay argues that Shari'a does its job admirably, and will undoubtedly succeed as a worthy replacement for the earlier, but now largely superseded, works of Schacht and Coulson. Nevertheless, this review essay also argues that the book will also prove to be very controversial, given what appears to be its polemical, and in many cases, overtly anti-modernist tone. In particular, this review essays argues that Hallaq's work suffers from a systematic failure to provide a normative account of the political from an Islamic perspective and the normative relationship of Islamic law to politics. As a result of this absence, the case he presents for his principal thesis, that modern Islamic law is essentially illegitimate if not an outright oxymoron, is ultimately unpersuasive, and risks reinforcing already well-entrenched western stereotypes about Islam, Muslims and Islamic law.
