Harvesting and Replanting the Field: On the Achievements of A History of Law in Canada

A HISTORY OF LAW IN CANADA, VOLUME ONE: BEGINNING TO 1866 is a major achievement in Canadian legal history and the culmination of five decades of work.1 The book is an end to an era of legal history writing in Canada, as its authors look behind to the work that has been done, pulling together the strands of doctrinal, social, intellectual, and professional histories of law, crime, and the courts. The book is also a beginning to a new era, as its authors show paths to where the field can go next and – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not – identify the flaws in what we, Canadian legal historians, have done so far. Canadian legal historians will justly start their work with this book for a generation or more to come.2 The seeds of modern Canadian legal history first sprouted in 1973 when University of Toronto law professor Richard Risk published the first of four articles on law and the economy in 19th century Upper Canada/Canada West/ Ontario and a broader “prospectus” for Canadian legal history.3 In 1979, a group of lawyers, judges, and others, including historian Peter Oliver at York University, founded the Osgoode Society for Legal History. The Osgoode Society has published, previous to A History of Law in Canada, some 112 volumes. This is not every book in English-language Canadian legal history published since 1981, but it is such a large portion that the series commands