Doug Hay becomes honorary fellow of ASLH

This just in from the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in Miami: Doug Hay of
Osgoode Hall Law School and York University has been elected an honorary fellow of the society. Doug joins recent Canadian honorary fellows Philip Girard and John Beattie and, like them, is more than deserving of this recognition as one of the greats in the field. Congratulations, Doug!
(Thanks to our roving correspondent, Jim Phillips.)

To Right Historical Wrongs by Carmela Murdocca from UBC Press

To Right Historical Wrongs: Race, Gender and Sentencing in Canada, by Carmela Murdocca, published by UBC Press.

Here's what the publisher has to say:

Following World War II, liberal nation-states sought to address injustices of the past. In keeping with trends in other countries, Canada's government began to consider its own implication in various past wrongs, and in the late twentieth century it began to implement reparative justice initiatives for historically marginalized people. 

In 1996 the Canadian Criminal Code was amended with section 718.2(e), which instructs judges to consider reparative justice for Aboriginal offenders where possible. In 2012 a Supreme Court decision noted that no Aboriginal person should be sentenced without full consideration of the legacies of colonialism, displacement, and residential schools. Yet despite these efforts, there are more Indigenous and racialized people in Canadian prisons now than at any other time in history. 

In To Right Historical Wrongs, Carmela Murdocca brings together the paradigm of reparative justice and the study of incarceration in an examination of this disconnect between political motivations for amending historical injustices and the vastly disproportionate reality of the penal system -- a troubling reality that is often ignored. 

Drawing on detailed examination of legal cases, parliamentary debates, government reports, media commentary, and community sources, Murdocca presents a new perspective on discussions of culture-based sentencing in an age of both mass incarceration and historical amendment.

Hat tip Sonia Lawrence, IFLS.

Canadian Legal History Blog now on Twitter!

Thanks (?) to the urging of fellow Osgoode Society director Trish McMahon, the Canadian Legal History Blog is now on Twitter.

Follow @OsgoodeSociety

CFP: submissions from grad and professional students sought for interdisciplinary history issue

Shared Paths: Western’s Graduate Journal of Interdisciplinary History

We are currently accepting submissions from Graduate and Professional students for the inaugural issue of Shared Paths: Western’s Journal of Interdisciplinary History.  The journal represents an effort to promote an interdisciplinary discussion of past events.  Each issue will be devoted to exploring one particularly interesting theme. 

For the first issue, authors are encouraged to submit papers which explore the concepts of Truth(s) and (In)Justice from any academic discipline and a variety of perspectives.  Applying interdisciplinary examinations of past events allows us to compare and contrast conceptions of truth and justice over time and distance.  The same event may look to represent justice to one party while the opposite is often true for the other.  Over time, what is ‘true’ becomes blurred as memories fade and stories pass from one generation to the next, from one observer to another.  History is replete with examples of how there is never one “truth” and “justice” is not universal. 

We welcome submissions from a broad range of perspectives and approaches to the study of Truth(s) and (In)justice, including, but not limited to:

• War and Conflict
• Social Justice and Peace
• Individual and Collective Memory
• Migration and Ethnic Relations
• Women’s Studies and Feminist Research
• Labour/Working Class Struggles
• Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction
• Environmental History
• First Nations History
• Religion and Religious groups
• Politics and the State
• Legal History
• Oral History
• Protest and Change
• Real and Imagined Space

Book Reviews related to the theme of Truth(s) and (In)Justice are also encouraged.  Shared Paths is a peer-reviewed journal, and seeks submissions of the highest academic quality. Submissions should conform to the guidelines attached below and be received no later than Friday, 31 January 2014.  Send submissions to sharedpaths@gmail.com along with a short abstract (250 words) and 5 ‘keywords’ as well as brief biographical and contact information.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts

Manuscripts must be submitted electronically as word documents. PDFs will not be accepted.

Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 9,000 words in length, inclusive of notes.

All manuscripts must conform The Chicago Manual of Style, 16^th Edition or newer.

Text must be in 12-point font and double-spaced.

Pages must be numbered.

Manuscripts must be blinded in preparation for the peer-review process. Any information that can identify the author is to be removed from the manuscript’s text and the electronic document’s metadata.

Manuscripts should be accompanied by a separate document with the authors' names, title of paper, institution, email address, an abstract not exceeding 250 words, and a list of 5 keywords that will be used to enhance the discoverability of articles published online.

Book Reviews

Book reviews are not to exceed 1,500 words in length.

References from the text being reviewed can be cited by indicating the page number in brackets. All other citations must conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition, or newer.

Illustrations and tables

Illustrations and tables should be compiled at the end of the manuscript.

New edition from MQUP: 36 Steps on the Road to Medicare by Houston and Massie

A timely re-issue/revision from McGill-Queen's University Press, given current events in the U.S. Why didn't we have anything like the degree of trouble they are having developing a programme of  universal access to health care? Here's one answer to the puzzle in the Saskatchewan antecedents of the programme.

36 Steps on the Road to Medicare: How Saskatchewan led the Way by  C. StuartHouston and Merle Massie sounds more on the medicine, policy and political history side and a bit rah-rah and presentist, so govern yourself accordingly, 

Here's what the publisher has to say.

The co-operative spirit of citizens in twentieth-century Saskatchewan nurtured innovation in health care and health policy. 36 Steps on the Road to Medicare showcases the decisions that led to the province's medicare system - the forerunner of Canadian health care.

Stuart Houston and Merle Massie document the range of Saskatchewan leadership on Canadian, North American, and world stages: municipal doctors and municipal hospitals, the first Red Cross Outpost Hospital in the British Empire, tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment, a successful pilot comprehensive regional health care plan, government-sponsored cancer clinics, innovative LSD and patient-oriented treatment for psychoses, the first full-time cancer physicist in Canada, and the world's first concerted clinical use of the betatron and Cobalt-60 in cancer treatment. They show how North America's first social-democratic government, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation - elected in 1944 and led by the incomparable Tommy Douglas - created the blueprint for comprehensive health care and how sequential steps on the road to medicare were implemented quickly and within budget. When federal support for national hospitalization became available, Saskatchewan could afford to initiate medicare in 1962. Other Canadian provinces soon followed Saskatchewan's lead.

Updated to engage with current debates, 36 Steps on the Road to Medicare navigates the history of medicare and demonstrates the spirit of innovation that Canada will need to save it.

Osgoode Society launches four books

The Osgoode Society formally launched its 2103 books yesterday at a reception at Osgoode Hall in Toronto.

The first three were published earlier this year; Essays in the History of Canadian Law XI: Quebec and the Canadas edited by Donald Fyson and G. Blaine Baker has just appeared in print. I haven't had a chance to go through it yet, though I did get a chance to read Blaine Baker's survey of the legal historiography of the period/region in draft. It will be enormously useful. And please check out the dust jacket for an amusing period cartoon, courtesy of McGill University history professor emeritus Brian Young.  Perceptions of lawyer greed (and persistence therein) are a historical constant.

Here's the blurb (picture sadly not yet available, I will update when it is):

This latest volume in the Essays in the History of Canadian Law series, with which we launched our publishing programme in 1981, is the first devoted to central Canada - what is now Ontario and Quebec before Confederation. Anchored by a comprehensive introduction exploring the main themes of the legal history of the region, a group of distinguished historians have contributed 11 substantive essays (three in French), on subjects as varied as women in court, grand juries, western law and aboriginal peoples, gun use and control, Quebec legal literature, married women's property, and imprisonment for debt.

The other three books have already been announced here but here they are again. (Note:  join the Osgoode Society and receive this year's membership book and purchase any of this year's additional books here. 

Our Members Book for 2013 is Memoirs and Reflections by the Hon. R. Roy McMurtry, published by the University of Toronto Press.  In addition to his most important accomplishment, the founding of the Osgoode Society, Roy McMurtry recounts and reflects on his years as a criminal defence lawyer, attorney-general of Ontario, High Commissioner to the UK, and Chief Justice of Ontario. Along the way we are given insights into the patriation of the Constitution, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Dubin Inquiry, and many other events. This book is a great read, a modern legal history of Canada and Ontario, and a tale of a life well lived.

Lawyers, Families, and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863-1963, by C. Ian Kyer, Lawyer and  Historian, published by Irwin Law. Ian Kyer holds a Ph.D. in history and was for many years a partner at Fasken Martineau. He has combined  his historical and legal expertise to produce a comprehensive account of the first century of Faskens. He takes us through crucial stages in the development of not just this but many other Canadian law firms - alliances with business, the growth of two or three man partnerships into considerably larger firms, and the links between leading firms and politics. Along the way we see how law practice changed, how remuneration was divided up, how strong leaders stamped their individual personalities on the collective identity of the firm. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the seismic changes in Canadian law practice.

The Massey Murder: A Maid, her Master, and the Trial that Shocked a Nation, by Charlotte Gray, Independent Historian, published by Harper Collins. In 1915 Carrie Davies, an 18-year old servant girl in the home of Charles (Bert) Massey, scion of the famous Massey family, shot and killed her employer as he entered his house after work. Remarkably, she was acquitted, and award winning popular historian Charlotte Gray explains how this happened. Vividly recreating the war time atmosphere, a press war, and conflicts over crime and gender, she highlights the role played by the defence lawyer who exploited the "unwritten law" of an honour killing in a rare Canadian case of jury nullification.

Campbell on crime and racial geography in Hamilton, Canada West

In the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, December 2013 (published online July 2013), Lyndsay Campbell writes on “The Disorderly Conduct of a Few”: Crime and Hamilton’s Racial Geography in the Early 1850s"

The abstract is not currently available. I will update when it is.