Supreme Court of Canada and Library and Archives Canada sign agreement on transfer, preservation and access to case files

Very good news for legal and constitutional historians: by a press release dated June 9th, Library and Archives Canada and the SCC announced access to the case files of SCC cases older than 50 years (h/t Trish McMahon).

Ottawa, Ontario, June 9, 2017 — Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) are pleased to announce an agreement that will ensure that the case files of Canada’s highest court will be preserved and accessible to future generations.

Under the agreement, the SCC will transfer ownership to LAC of its case files older than 50 years. This will bring many historical SCC case files under LAC’s control, where they can be preserved and used for research purposes.

Among the cases covered by the agreement are:

•         Roncarelli v. Duplessis, a landmark 1959 ruling on the rule of law involving the Premier of Quebec;

•         the Margarine Reference which outlined the proper exercise of the criminal law power under the Canadian Constitution; and

•         several matters decided in the aftermath of the enactment of the Canadian Bill of Rights in August 1960.

The LAC-SCC agreement also means that certain categories of the Court’s judicial information, such as the Collegial files of the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, will become accessible to the public 50 years after a case file has been closed, thereby providing insights into the inner deliberations of the Court. 

The SCC will continue to control its active case files and closed files until 50 years after a judgment has been rendered. 

Quotes

“On behalf of the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada, I am very proud of this important milestone in the preservation of the Court’s historical records. I wish to thank all who played a role in this matter for their untiring efforts to arrive at this important agreement which will add to our country’s institutional memory.”

Roger Bilodeau, Q.C., Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada

“Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is very pleased to be adding an important part of the country’s judicial and legal history to its collection. The Supreme Court of Canada has played a key role in making Canada the just and equitable society that we all enjoy today, and it is with much pride that LAC will help preserve and share that legacy.  ”

Dr. Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Library and Archives Canada

For more information, please contact:

Gib van Ert
Executive Legal Officer
Supreme Court of Canada
613-996-9296

media@scc-csc.ca

Richard Provencher

Media Relations

Library and Archives Canada

819-994-4589

BAC.Media.LAC@canada.ca

About the Supreme Court of Canada

The Supreme Court of Canada is Canada's final court of appeal. It serves Canadians by deciding legal issues of public importance, thereby contributing to the development of all branches of law applicable within Canada.

About Library and Archives Canada

The mandate of Library and Archives Canada is to preserve the documentary heritage of Canada for the benefit of present and future generations, and to be a source of enduring knowledge accessible to all, thereby contributing to the cultural, social and economic advancement of Canada. Library and Archives Canada also facilitates co-operation among communities involved in the acquisition, preservation and diffusion of knowledge, and serves as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada and its institutions. Stay connected with Library and Archives Canada on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

****

La Cour suprême du Canada et Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

signent une entente sur le transfert et la conservation des dossiers d’instance de même que sur l’accès à ces dossiers

Pour diffusion immédiate

Ottawa (Ontario), le 9 juin 2017 — Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (BAC) et le Bureau du registraire de la Cour suprême du Canada (CSC) sont heureux d’annoncer la conclusion d’une entente qui garantira la conservation des dossiers d’instance du plus haut tribunal du pays et la possibilité pour les générations futures d’y avoir accès.

Selon l’entente, la CSC cèdera à BAC la propriété de ses dossiers d’instance de plus de 50 ans. Un grand nombre de dossiers d’instance historiques de la CSC passeront ainsi entre les mains de BAC, où ils pourront être conservés et consultés à des fins de recherche.

Parmi les dossiers visés par l’accord, mentionnons :

•         Roncarelli c. Duplessis, un arrêt célèbre de 1959 sur la primauté du droit impliquant le premier ministre du Québec;

•         Le Renvoi sur la margarine, où la Cour a décrit l’exercice légitime de la compétence en droit criminel au regard de la Constitution canadienne;

•         Plusieurs arrêts rendus dans la foulée de l’adoption de la Déclaration canadienne des droits en août 1960.

L’entente intervenue entre BAC et la CSC signifie également que certaines catégories de renseignements judiciaires de la Cour, tels que les dossiers collégiaux des juges de la Cour suprême du Canada, seront mises à la disposition du public 50 ans après la fermeture d’un dossier d’instance, ce qui fournira des éclaircissements sur les délibérations à huis clos de la Cour. 

La CSC conservera la mainmise sur ses dossiers d’instance actifs et dossiers fermés durant les 50 années qui suivent le prononcé d’un jugement. 

Citations

« Au nom du Bureau du registraire de la Cour suprême du Canada, je suis très fier de ce jalon important dans la conservation des dossiers historiques de la Cour. Je tiens à remercier tous ceux et celles ayant joué un rôle dans cette entreprise des efforts sans relâche qu’ils ont consentis pour parvenir à cette entente d’importance qui contribuera à la mémoire institutionnelle de notre pays. »

Roger Bilodeau, c.r., registraire de la Cour suprême du Canada

« Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (BAC) est très heureux d’enrichir sa collection de ces éléments importants de l’histoire juridique et légale du pays. La Cour suprême du Canada a joué un rôle prépondérant dans l’édification de la société juste et équitable qu’est le Canada d’aujourd’hui. C’est donc avec grande fierté que BAC participera à la préservation et à la diffusion de cet héritage. »

Guy Berthiaume, bibliothécaire et archiviste du Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

Pour de plus amples renseignements, veuillez communiquer avec :

Gib van Ert
Conseiller juridique principal
Cour suprême du Canada
613-996-9296

media@scc-csc.ca

Richard Provencher

Relations avec les médias

Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

819-994-4589

BAC.Media.LAC@canada.ca

À propos de la Cour suprême du Canada

La Cour suprême du Canada est la juridiction d’appel de dernier ressort du pays. Elle sert les Canadiens en tranchant des questions de droit d’importance pour le public, contribuant ainsi à l’évolution de toutes les branches du droit au Canada. 

À propos de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

Le mandat de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada consiste à préserver le patrimoine documentaire du Canada pour les générations présentes et futures, et à être une source de savoir permanent accessible à tous, contribuant ainsi à l’épanouissement culturel, social et économique du Canada. Bibliothèque et Archives Canada facilite également la concertation des divers milieux intéressés à l’acquisition, à la préservation et à la diffusion du savoir, en plus d’être la mémoire permanente de l’administration fédérale et de ses institutions. Restez branchés avec Bibliothèque et Archives Canada sur Twitter, Facebook, Flickr et YouTube.

Adams and Stanger-Ross on WWW Japanese-Canadian internment on SSRN

Eric Adams of the University of Alberta and Jordan Stanger-Ross of the University of Victoria have posted 

"Promises of Law: The Unlawful Dispossession of Japanese Canadians" on SSRN

The article will appear in vol.54 (3) of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal.

Abstract:

This article is about the origins, betrayal, and litigation of a promise of law. In 1942, while it ordered the internment of twenty-one thousand Canadians of Japanese descent, the Canadian government enacted Orders in Council authorizing the Custodian of Enemy Property to seize all real and personal property owned by Japanese Canadians living within coastal British Columbia. Demands from the Japanese-Canadian community and concern from within the corridors of government resulted in amendments to those orders which made clear that the Custodian held that property as a “protective” trust, and would return it to Japanese Canadians at the conclusion of the war. That is not what happened. In January 1943, a new order in council authorized the sale of all property seized from Japanese Canadians. The trust abandoned, a promise broken, the Custodian sold everything it had taken. This article traces the promise to protect property from its origins in the federal bureaucracy and demands on the streets to its demise in Nakashima v Canada, the Exchequer Court decision that held that the legal promise carried no legal consequence. We argue that the failure of the promise should not obscure its history as a product of multi-vocal processes, community activism, conflicting wartime pressures, and competing conceptions of citizenship, legality, and justice. Drawing from a rich array of archival research, our article places the legacy of the property loss of Japanese Canadians at the disjuncture between law as a blunt instrument capable of gross injustice and its role as a social institution of good faith.

Research Colloquium for grad students in legal history (with funding possibility!)

Student Research Colloquium announced

The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, October 25, and Thursday, October 26, 2017, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. The SRC enables a small number of Ph.D. students and law students to discuss their in-progress dissertations and law review articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars.

The SRC’s target audience includes early-post-coursework graduate students and historically minded law students. The colloquium seeks to introduce such students to legal history, to each other, to the ASLH, and to the legal-historical scholarly community generally. Students working in all chronological and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are students whose projects engage legal-historical themes but who have not yet received any formal training in legal history. Applicants who have not had an opportunity to present their work at ASLH annual meetings or who have not otherwise had an opportunity to discuss their work with legal historians are particularly encouraged to apply. A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.

Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group. The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of two faculty directors. The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.

The application deadline is July 15, 2017. Applicants should submit:

* a cover letter;
* a CV;
* a two-page, single-spaced “research statement,” describing an in-progress project; and
* a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from, or together with, the other materials.

Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2017. Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at jowertheimer [at] davidson.edu 

CFP: Two day seminar in Cambridge on legal history and empire across centuries

via Ed Cavanagh:

This is a general call for papers in anticipation of an intimate two-day seminar to be held at the University of Cambridge on Friday 23rd March and Saturday 24th March, 2018. This will be an advanced workshop, with drafts circulated in advance. The event will showcase a number of rare and searching attempts to identify continuities and differences across ancient, medieval, and modern legal and imperial contexts. This moves back towards Braudel while also tailing in the direction of all that heat left by David Armitage and Jo Guildi’s fiery interventions in The History Manifesto, which calls for newly ambitious historical studies to break from long-set moulds. Empire lends itself naturally to explorations of this kind using large time-frames. Not only is this due to the endurance of many empires across centuries, but this also owes to the presence (and comparability) of empires within different periods. Legal source materials are helpful for facilitating this kind of approach, whether relating to private law events or the public nature of imperium. In the right hands, legal texts, court records, official opinions, drafted constitutions and acts, along with the correspondences and commentaries relating thereto can push us to contemplate a number of bold conclusions about economics, politics, society, religiosity, and humanity in general.

Abstracts of proposals (between 200 and 500 words) will be accepted until July 31st, 2017, at lawandempirecambridge@gmail.com. PhD students and postdoctoral scholars are encouraged to include a CV with their proposal. Your proposal will be especially welcome if you anticipate to be able to share work according to the following guidelines:

1. It will extend across at least three centuries OR will otherwise offer an original reinterpretation of a more focused period with the explicit goal to allow for new studies across periodizations;
2. It will cover any period from Ancient Greece to the present day (900 BC — 2017 AD), with preference, however, shown for the period between the latter Roman Empire and the interwar period (500 AD – 1939 AD);
3. It will explore a historical topic relevant to law (broadly encompassing legal thought, legal process, public law, private law, and constitutionalism) OR empire (pertaining either to specific imperial regimes or to imperium as synonym for public authority, sovereignty, authority), with preference shown to approaches that consider BOTH;
4. It will be laid out in a thematic or chronological narrative style, or otherwise in case studies unified appropriately in conclusion.

For enquiries and submissions, please contact Dr Edward Cavanagh, at lawandempirecambridge@gmail.com.

Petition regarding secret Government of Canada Archives

Via Osgoode Society author Dennis Molinaro:

It has come to the attention of the public that the Canadian government over the course of decades has amassed large quantities of historical documents, numbering in the millions, and has kept this material in several different areas linked to institutions such as the Privy Council Office, Global Affairs, the Department of Justice and others. The holdings of the government have been kept secret. A petition has been created and is available to sign electronically on the e-petition government website. It is petition number e-1090. The petition calls on the government to transfer all historical material to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) as well as to reform the Access to Information Act to ensure historical material is regularly transferred to the archives, as well as enabling transparent citizen access to documents. The LAC Act anticipates the direct transfer of material from government departments, institutions and agencies to the National Archivist and, therefore, the practice of holding back such transfers thwarts the spirit and letter of the Act and undermines the role of LAC as a central repository for the documentary heritage of Canada.

https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-1090

U of T library online exhibit: Pierson v. Post judgment roll

The policy of this blog has been to post on Canadian legal history, rather than legal history written by Canadians. I have made a few exceptions, and here is an exceptionally worthy one. (Beside which, Pierson v. Post has been taught in Canadian as well as American classrooms, although it is very much an American case.)

Angela Fernandez of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, a notable Pierson v. Post scholar, has arranged an online library exhibit of the judgment roll.

The exhibit includes a short piece by Angela on the context of the judgment, and reproduces the twenty pages of the judgment roll in PDF format.

Here's the description of the exhibit:

Pierson v. Post has been made famous by its use in American property law classrooms since the 1950s. It is often the first case law students study in property as it provides an introduction to the concept of first possession and how one acquires possession in a wild animal, the fox, owned by no one. 

The case report reproduced in law school casebooks was created by New York’s first official law reporter George Caines after the case was argued by eminent counsel and reversed in Pierson’s favor at the New York Supreme Court. What law students generally read is a brief statement of the facts, followed the majority decision by Justice Daniel Tompkins and a dissent by Justice Brockholst Livingston. 

The Judgment Roll is a copy — probably made by the clerk of Pierson’s lawyer Nathan Sanford — of the documents Sanford filed in his writ of certiorari to the New York Supreme Court. This was a process in which the loser before a Justice of the Peace could appeal the decision by asking for the New York Supreme Court to command that the Justice of the Peace explain what had been done before him in the magistrate’s court, in this case a jury trial held at Post’s request on December 30, 1802, for their review. It was the job of the New York Supreme Court to check, yes, all the ‘i’s were dotted and ‘t’s were crossed in the magistrate’s proceedings and if they were not, Pierson (the “now plaintiff” before the New York Supreme Court) was justified in winning a reversal of the jury’s 75¢ award for Post and his $5 in costs. The Judgment Roll also includes the command to Justice of the Peace John N. Fordham to return the documentation, Sanford’s six specific grounds of appeal, as well as the words the New York Supreme Court used in order to hold the case over from year to year until it was ultimately decided in Pierson’s favor on September 10, 1805. Sanford then filed this copy of all of the documents (those provided by Fordham, his own, and the New York Supreme Court) as the “Record” in the case on the same day.

This judgment roll was found by University of Toronto law professor and legal historian Angela Fernandez at the Division of Old Records, New York County Clerk’s Office in New York City in May 2007.

Each page of the judgment roll is reproduced with an accompanying transcript prepared by Professor Fernandez.

It has subsequently disappeared but a dataset was created to preserve the images and make them publicly available. You can find it here. A transcript of the Judgment Roll is also available as an appendix in Angela Fernandez, Pierson v. Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Running Fox by Paul de Vos, courtesy of Museo Nacional del Prado.

See also related articles through the U of T Dataverse accessible here.

Thomas McMahon, 'We Must Teach the Indian What Laws Are': The Laws of Indian Residential Schools in Canada on SSRN

Thomas L. McMahon has posted 'We Must Teach the Indian What Law Is': The Laws of Indian Residential Schools in Canada (April 18, 2017) on SSRN. 

Here's the abstract:

This paper provides a chronological sequence of the laws that were used to create and enforce Indian Residential Schools in Canada. The paper provides extensive excerpts from the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The excerpts are chosen based on how directly they are related to law, and the excerpts are re-organized to be presented in a chronological manner. The table of contents of the paper can serve as a time line of the laws that created and enforced and ended Indian Residential Schools. Other sources are also cited.

This paper is one of series written by the author in attempting to understand and explain why it was nearly impossible for indigenous peoples to use the legal system to protect themselves or obtain compensation for the abuses they suffered in the residential schools until well into the 1990s.