A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario, 1921-2015 by Lori Chambers is now in print. Members who selected this as their book for 2016 will have already received it in the mail or should receive it shortly.Professor Chambers’ book traces the history of adoption law in Ontario from 1921, when the first Adoption Act was passed, to the present. She details the origins and passage of that legislation and then examines a series of legal changes and accompanying controversies, from debates about the meaning of consent by birth mothers to same-sex adoption. Many of these controversies – adoption of aboriginal children, international adoption, secrecy in adoption records – have emerged in the last few decades, and this is therefore very much a ‘modern’ history of adoption law. In analyzing the development of the law Chambers skilfully weaves together statutes and cases with extra-legal debates over the meaning of parental and childrens’ rights.
A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario, 1921-2015 is one of two members' books for the Osgoode Society this year. Members can receive either this, or Brad Miller's Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border, 1819-1914. The book not selected as your member's book can be purchased as an 'optional extra.' Also available for purchase as an optional extra is Law, Debt and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of Eighteenth-Century Halifax by James Muir.
Join the Osgoode Society now and select your book. Students pay $21.50, others $50.00. You can also become a sustaining member or corporate sustaining member for $155.00 or $500 respectively.
