People and Place: Historical Influences on Legal Culture

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

People and Place succeeds in at least three respects. First, it honours
the contributions of University of Calgary Professor Louis Knafla to
Canadian—and especially Western Canadian—legal history. Second, each
author carefully foregrounds the plight and activities of a historical
protagonist in Canada over the last two centuries (with excursions into
Oregon and New South Wales) within the context of the legal system of
his or her day, opening the door to an often lively discussion of legal
values, prostitution, rape, religious enthusiasm, popular and
professional conceptions of criminality, and lawyerly practice. With
their interplay of personal and societal values, in which the latter
often prevailed, these studies will appeal to beginning students of
Canadian legal history and to the wider reading public.

Finally, there is a welcome gender balance among authors (seven women
and six men), and four of the nine substantive chapters focus on the
plight, grit, and determination of women. They and their male
counterparts realized that the legal system that they confronted
mirrored discriminatory assumptions about class, gender roles, and the
poor, but they pressed ahead to make their voices heard, to have their
day in court, to draw attention to the injustices to which they were
subject, and to show how their case signalled a need to reform the law,
its process, and its values.