From Punishment to Doing Good: Family Courts and Socialized Justice in Ontario, 1880-1940

Charlotte Neff is an associate professor of law at Laurentian
University.

This book charts the development, from 1880 to 1940, of specialized
family courts that dispensed “socialized justice.” According to the
author, socialized justice is based on “the assumption that ‘doing
good’ should take precedence over legal rights.” With respect to the
courts, this meant removing domestic hearings from the criminal courts
and creating either separate courts or divisions of existing courts to
deal exclusively with them.

Chunn begins by reviewing modern theoretical perspectives on
social-welfare reform and “the moral-political regulation of marginal
populations” in the context of the shift from laissez-faire
individualism, which emphasized minimal state involvement and led to
legal formalism, to socialized justice, which was premised on
individualization and an interventionist state. In the context of social
welfare, this was reflected in the shift from an emphasis on moral
responsibility for one’s condition—and hence on punishing aberrant
behavior—to an emphasis on identifying individual problems and
attempting to resolve them.

Chunn then undertakes a historical review of court jurisdiction over
domestic matters, highlighting the political events and political
pragmatism that shaped developments. She also examines the operations of
the family courts in existence by 1940, and concludes that they failed
to meet the objectives of their supporters in two major respects:
domestic disputes were not decriminalized, nor was there a reduction in
the cost of dealing with them. The author ultimately concludes that,
although the socialized courts could be seen as legal coercion of
working and dependent poor, they were not the result of “any organized
state conspiracy to oppress the poor,” and that the active support of
those oppressed was clearly necessary to their growing involvement in
family life. Thus, she supports “the revisionist conceptualization of
reform as an inherently dualistic phenomenon—one that will always
generate both positive and negative consequences.”