New book from UBC press on the legal response to Westray by Steven Bittle

New in print from the UBC Press Law and Society Series, Still Dying for a Living, by University of Ottawa criminologist Steven Bittle. Hardcover, $95.00. Order online here.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

In 1992, a preventable explosion at the WestrayMine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. More than a decade later, the government enacted Bill C-45, commonly known as the Westray bill, to hold organizations criminally liable for seriously injuring and killing workers and the public. Yet, while the federal government declared the Westray bill an important step, the law has thus far failed to produce a crackdown on corporate crime.

 

In Still Dying for a Living, Steven Bittle turns a critical eye on the Westray bill, revealing how legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding the bill downplayed

the seriousness of workplace injury and death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but largely unavoidable accidents and in the process obscuring their underlying causes

 

 

 

 

 

Free article from Canadian Review of American Studies

 

 

UTPJournals Focus

 

Included in the free articles for October 24-30, 2012  

Canadian Review of American Studies 36.1 “‘Eighty Years and More: Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment” by Mary Chapma and Angela Mills

Abstract: ‘‘Eighty Years and More – Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment’’ is the introduction to a special issue on American Woman Suffrage timed to coincide with the eighty-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The anniversary invites us to raise questions about memory and memorialization, about which stories about suffrage endure (such as Susan B. Anthony’s primacy in the campaign) and which figures and activities have been excluded from myth-making chronicles like the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. As an overview of the collection, the introduction outlines both the impetuses for and the implications of dismantling traditional narratives of suffrage and refiguring the campaign as a multilayered, multifaceted phenomenon, functioning on many fronts and involving many figures whose efforts have been hidden from history. The special issue as a whole works to challenge old orthodoxies about the suffrage campaign by re-evaluating the contributions of figures like New York author–activist Lillie Devereux Blake and Wyoming justice of the peace Esther Morris and by reconsider­ing the rhetorical work performed by the creative tactics that characterized the campaign, including oratory, literature, and stereotyping. Reviews of three recent works of scholarship on American suffrage remind us of the persistent interest in interrogating the historiography of suffrage and of the continued need for research that furthers the goals of re-evaluation.

Toronto Legal History Group now Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop

Since there is considerable overlap (probably about 99% plus) between the readers of this blog and the people on Jim Phillips' legal history distribution list, I am always reluctant to post duplicate notices.

However, there are times I do take notice here of announcements Jim has sent to the list which readers may want to be able to consult without rooting through old emails.

This seems like one of those times.

I won't reproduce the entire email (anyone who is not on the list should email Jim at j.phillips@utoronto.ca pronto--you get sent great draft papers to read.)

But here is an excerpt:

...the [legal history] group is continuing to run in the same way that it has for many years. The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History is funding it, and I am very grateful to the Directors for that decision. Its formal name is now The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop.  Once the new Osgoode Society website is up and running (in a few weeks time I hope) you will be able to access schedules and other information (and at least some papers) on that website, and information will also be posted on the Osgoode Society blog run by Mary Stokes.
For the sake of convenience the sessions will continue to be held at the University of Toronto law school.
I am also happy to say that Osgoode Hall Law School has agreed to make a financial contribution to the workshop. That contribution will be earmarked to bring in one or two speakers from outside Toronto. Again, my sincere thanks to Osgoode Hall for this, and especially to Dean Lorne Sossin.

Jim goes on to say that new or renewed memberships (which include the members' book of the year) and donations (tax receiptable) to the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History are always welcome, and while the workshop is sufficiently funded, anyone who especially wants to support the workshop financially for the future may designate his or her donation to that purpose or to the Stuart Thom fund for special projects.

You can also support the workshop by volunteering to present, attending as many sessions as you can (you don't have to restrict yourself to papers that are squarely in your area of expertise!) and sending Jim any suggestions for occasional out-of-town visitors.

Reminder: there is an extra session of the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop this week, not listed in the orginal schedule. We look forward to seeing many of you at 6:30 pm, Wednesday, to hear Catherine MacMillan of the University of London speak on "Judging the Coronation Cases: Edwardian Advances in Contractual Frustration?".

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.