The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle

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

This collection of 12 substantive, groundbreaking, informative, and
engagingly written essays celebrates the 250th anniversary of the
Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Canada’s oldest common-law court. The
essays will appeal to academics and their students in Canadian and legal
history, the legal community, and the general reading public interested
in law, the courts, and legal culture. Anchored by two wide-ranging and
comprehensive general surveys dividing at 1867, they open windows on
special topics and themes: the London courts at Westminster from which
the Nova Scotia court drew its procedures and precedents; the
sociological and professional backgrounds of the judges; the courthouses
in which they sat; the Supreme Court’s first session in 1754; women as
litigants before the courts; the place of American precedents in a court
that was staffed originally by, and owed its national standing to,
immigrants and refugees from events in the Thirteen Colonies and United
States after 1776; and the 20th-century extension of its jurisdiction
into specialized contemporary fields such as labour relations and the
assessment of liability for personal injuries sustained as a result of
industrialization (where specialized tribunals were initially identified
as potential, even upstart, rivals). Throughout the two centuries under
examination, as evident on the constitutional front (and all legal
claims must ultimately be grounded on the division of powers established
by the constitution in 1867), the Nova Scotia Supreme Court appears to
have been guided by a desire to retain a considerable degree of local
autonomy with regard to how it interpreted and applied the law.

In its content, scope, professionalism, and editing, this volume sets a
high standard for those researching and writing Canadian legal history.