Pilarczyk, Acts of the 'Most Sanguinary Rage': Spousal Murder in Montreal, 1825-1850 in AJLH

Ian Pilarczyk of Boston University has published Acts of the “Most Sanguinary Rage”: Spousal Murder in Montreal, 1825-1850 in the September issue of the American Journal of Legal History.

Here's the abstract:

his study examines the 11 cases of wife murder (uxoricide) and 3 cases of husband murder (mariticide) identified in the judicial district of Montreal between 1825-1850, a period of considerable social flux.Through examination of judicial archives and primary sources, supplemented by comprehensive review of period newspapers, these cases allow us to examine the dynamics and causes that motivated spousal murders and offer insight into the motivations, means, and mechanics of investigation and prosecution of these crimes as well as the role of mercy and executive clemency. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of family violence and the administration of criminal justice for an under-examined period in Canadian history. These gendered crimes reflect “traditional” male attempts to exert and maintain power dynamics and privilege through the use of ongoing violence, rather than the influence of romantic ideals and sexual jealousy reflected in other jurisdictions of the period, and rarely involved premeditated murder. Wives, in contrast, had motives that were altogether murkier, but their actions suggested they acted opportunistically to achieve their desired ends. Whatever the reasons that motivated them, these cases were set against a deeply-gendered backdrop of juridical processes and media coverage that reinforced traditional notions of gender and social mores, and in which the identity of female offenders and victims receded almost to the point of invisibility.

Law and Society Association and Canadian Law and Society Association to meet in Toronto, June 2018

I am really looking forward to this. Let's try for a strong Canadian legal history contingent, both presenting and attending!

2018 joint meeting of the Law and Society Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association/ Association Canadienne Droit et Société June 7 - 10, 2018 Sheraton Centre, Toronto, Canada

LAW AT THE CROSSROADS: LE DROIT A LA CROISÉE DES CHEMINS

For thousands of years the place where the City of Toronto is located has been a crossroad where many peoples have met and had fruitful exchanges. According to some Indigenous knowledge keepers, the word “Toronto” comes from the Wendat term for a fishing weir constructed of sticks standing in the water. Lake and river fishing has been an important activity for the area’s many Indigenous peoples, including Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Mississauga and Chippewa. The Indigenous knowledge frameworks and laws of the peoples of this area encourage a multilayered understanding of an item such as a fishing weir in terms of its natural, sacred, practical and social meanings.

The area continues to be home to many Indigenous people from all over Canada and beyond, but Toronto has also been shaped by immigration flows from many parts of the world, with about half of its current residents being born outside of Canada.

The Law and Society Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association hope that our joint meeting in Toronto will be creative and fruitful, in keeping with the traditional use of this land as a gathering place, and that visitors to the area will take the opportunity to make new connections not only with one another but also with diverse local communities.

Call for papers and panels here.

Stanger-Ross, Blomley "‘My land is worth a million dollars’: How Japanese Canadians contested their dispossession in the 1940s" in LHR

New in the Law and History Review, Jordan Stanger-Ross and Nicholas Blomley and the Landscapes of Injustice Collective of the University of Victoria have an article: Stanger-Ross, Blomley "‘My land is worth a million dollars’: How Japanese Canadians contested their dispossession in the 1940s."

Here's the abstract:

On July 31, 1944, Rikizo Yoneyama, a former resident of Haney, British Columbia, an agricultural area east of Vancouver, wrote to the Canadian Minister of Justice to protest the sale of his property. Two years earlier, when he and his family had packed their belongings for their forced expulsion from coastal British Columbia, they could take with them only what they could carry and, like other displaced people, they left much behind. “I realize that we are the victims of a war emergency and as such are quite willing to undergo … hardship … to help safeguard the shores of our homeland,” wrote Yoneyama, “however, I do urgently desire to return to my home … when the present emergency ends. May I plead your assistance in the sincere request for the return of that home?” When letters like his did receive a response from the federal government (there is no record that he did so in this case) it came in the form of standard letter, acknowledging that “the disposal of … property will be a matter of personal concern” but informing Japanese Canadians that, in conformity with a new federal law, everything, including their homes, would be sold.

Travel grant for research on environmental groups at Laurier archives

via H-Canada:

Applications are currently being accepted for the Joan Mitchell Travel Grant at the Laurier Archives, Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.  The travel grant will support a graduate student or established scholar who wishes to travel to the Laurier Archives to conduct research.  For more information on the grant, please visit: https://library.wlu.ca/research-materials/archives#tab-travel-award.  The application deadline is: December 2, 2016.
The Laurier Archives collects in three main areas: The history of the Lutheran Church in Canada; the environmental conservation movement in Canada; and Canadian music....

In our environment conservation collection, records of the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee document many of the major environmental issues facing Canada's north.  It contains series documenting pipelines, (including the McKenzie Valley Pipeline; the Alaska Highway Pipeline; the Foothills Pipeline); hydro-electric projects in the Hudson Bay area; interviews with Indigenous leaders about the effects of large scale dams; marine conservation, national parks; Northern communities and Indigenous peoples.  The Ken Hewitt fonds document hydrological research in the Himalayas.  Also check out the records of the Canadian Water Resources Association; the Canadian Environmental Law Association; the Canadian Biosphere Reserve Association; and geographer George Francis.

For more information, please contact the Laurier Archives.

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Harris, "Property and Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve and a Canadian City"

Doug Harris has posted "Property and Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve and a Canadian City" on SSRN. The article will appear in volume 50 issue 2 of the  UBC Law Review. 

Here's the abstract.

Property rights, wrote Morris Cohen in 1927, are delegations of sovereign power. They are created by the state and operate to establish limits on its power. As such, the allocation of property rights is an exercise of sovereignty and a limited delegation of it. Sixty years later, Joseph Singer used Cohen’s conceptual framing in a critical review of developments in American Indian law. Where the US Supreme Court had the opportunity to label an American Indian interest as either a sovereign interest or a property interest, he argued, it invariably chose to the disadvantage of the Indians. Within Canada, Indigenous peoples have struggled to have their interests recognized as property rights, let alone as sovereign power. As John Borrows makes clear, Canadian courts have established Canada’s sovereignty as the jurisdictional bedrock on which Indigenous peoples must establish their property rights. This article uses the uses the concepts of property and sovereignty as revealed by Cohen and as interpreted by Singer and Borrows in the context of the rights of Indigenous peoples to recount the history of the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of an Indian reserve in the City of Vancouver. Allotted by the colony of British Columbia in the 1860s and expanded in 1876 after British Columbia joined the Canadian confederation, the Kitsilano Indian Reserve is one of more than 1500 Indian reserves scattered across the province. Using archival material, much of it introduced in litigation, the article examines the changing character of the Indian reserve in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a property interest and as a limited delegation of sovereignty, in a context where the distribution of sovereignty between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state remains unresolved.