The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop meets this Wednesday, October 10th, at 6.30, Faculty Common Room, Flavelle House, U of T Law School.

The presenter is Bettina Bradbury of York University, on

"Troubling Inheritances: An Illegitimate Maori daughter contests her father’s will in the New Zealand Courts and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council."

Australia-New Zealand Legal History Conference

The bi-annual conference of the Australia-New Zealand Legal History Society is taking place at the University of Technology, Sydney, December 8-10. It is organised by Shaunnagh Dorsett, and the theme is 'Receiving Laws/Giving Laws.' The programme and other details can be accessed at 
www.law.uts.ed.au/research/conferences/receiving_laws.html.

Jim Phillips

Wilke on Memorializing Nazis' Victims in Berlin

Forthcoming in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, an article in the vein of public history by Christiane Wilke on "Remembering Complexity? Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin," now available on SSRN.

Here's the abstract:

How do memorials shape who we think we are? And how are our identities involved when we debate, create, and interact with memorials? This essay engages in a conversation with scholarship on intersectional identities and memorial practices in Berlin. Intersectionality scholarship, with its roots in US critical race feminism, has much to offer for thinking about the complexity of identities, yet it does not consider the role of memory, time, and temporality. The scholarship on memory and memorials, in turn, does not sufficiently consider the complexity of identities of those who are memorialized and of those who visit memorials. The essay asks how three different monuments for Nazi victims in Berlin allow for or facilitate the memory of complex identities. The example of the Monument for the Persecuted Homosexuals shows that memorial practices can be crucial in contemporary identity politics and social movements. The essay calls for a more self-reflexive approach to the role of identities and complexity in memorial scholarship and practice.

Cross biography of Robert Baldwin off the press

From Philip Girard, the news that Dr.Michael Cross's biography of Robert Baldwin is now available in bookstores. In Ottawa, at least. The Oxford University Press website is reporting a November 2012 availability. Maybe that's just online.



A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning Star of Memory
by Michael Cross



In any event, this is welcome new to historians of Ontario. It was a little embarrassing that we had no book-length academic bio of Baldwin, one of the most significant Upper Canadians of the nineteenth century. And to legal historians: while Baldwin is primarily known as a political reformer, a recent book by legal historian Blake Brown, A Trying Question, has highlighted his extraordinary innovation in jury reform. He is also known (to me, mostly) as the progenitor of the Municipal Act of 1849, known as the Baldwin Act to contemporaries, an equally impressive reform in local governance. Here's hoping Professor Cross doesn't give short shrift to these legal arena achievements, though admittedly they are less spectacular than Baldwin's personal peccadilloes, which to my mind put Mackenzie King's to shame.

Thanks for the tip, Philip.

Smith on Canadian Currency and Banking Laws 1871

In the vol. 13 (3) September 2012 issue of Enterprise & Society, an article by Andrew Smith of Coventry University, "Continental Divide: The Canadian Banking and Currency Laws of 1871 in the Mirror of the United States." Professor Smith's blog on economic and business history, The Past Speaks is highly recommended (by me!)

Here's the abstract:

The essay discusses the ways in which an 1871 banking and currency law helped Canada form a stable banking industry, and compares this industry with that of the U.S. The laws' implementation of Canadian transcontinental branch banking and importance to Canadian state formation are outlined. The effects of Canada's Britain-inspired political culture on the formation of this banking system are also detailed. Other topics discussed include monetary policy, usury laws, and legislative debates.

New work on Canadian human rights policy (including history)

A new publication from McGill-Queen's University Press,

Why Canada Cares:

Human Rights and Foreign Policy in Theory and Practice by Andrew Lui includes a large dollop of legal history as part of the examination of Canadian human rights foreign policies.

 

Here's the publisher's blurb:

 

Support for international human rights has become an entrenched part of Canada's national mythology. Despite the gravity of human rights issues and how Canada appears to champion various causes, the role of human rights in Canadian foreign policy has received surprisingly little scrutiny. In Why Canada Cares, Andrew Lui brings clarity to this under-explored part of Canada's identity.

 

Lui provides a chronological and theoretically grounded analysis of human rights in Canadian foreign policy since 1945. He argues that while the country has rarely proven willing to sacrifice material advantage for international human rights causes, Canada has pursued human rights as part of a broader attempt to cement individual rights as the cornerstone of Canadian federalism and aimed to mitigate friction between the country's diverse social groups. In other words, international human rights were implemented as a way to express and establish an expansive vision of what Canadian society should look like in order to survive and flourish as a coherent and unified political entity.

 

Why Canada Cares uncovers the foundations of Canada's international human rights policies and offers insight into their possibilities and limits.

 

 

Updated: Kirkby on Henry Maine and the ReConstitution of the British Empire

Coel Kirkby, who is finishing up his dissertation at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge has sent me a pdf of a recently published review article in the Modern Law Review (not yet online). It's a review of Karuna Mantena s' Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, 269 pp, hb £27.50.) Coel hopes it explains 'ideologies' better than the paper he gave at the Toronto Legal History Group workshop in the spring. Well, Coel, I confess I hardly remember that discussion now, but I think the review essay is both clear and interesting. You should post it on SSRN, though, so I could include a link! Or on your Academia.edu page.

Update: Coel says the article is now online at .http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2012.00919.x/abstract