Historical Perspectives on Law and Society in Canada

Christopher English is a professor of history at the Memorial University
of Newfoundland.

Most of the 15 articles in this volume have been previously published in
scholarly journals within the last decade. The anthology reflects the
recent expansion of academic interest in legal history and in the place
of law in society. Its case studies extend from the discourses of
European–Native contacts in the 18th century to the constitutional
status of aboriginals in the 1960s, and along the way cover various
aspects of civil, constitutional, family, and criminal law. Policing,
popular resistance to authority, alternative sources of dispute
resolution, regulating the poor and child labor, and attempts to secure
status and equality for women are accorded searching and critical
examination, all with an eye to the individuals involved. Whether the
authors approach legal history as historians (as the majority here do),
as anthropologists, or as academic lawyers, they write with a depth of
knowledge, an economy of style, and an absence of jargon that are
refreshing.

Interesting for the fact situations and personalities they describe,
these articles also introduce readers to the concepts, themes, problems,
and questions debated by historians of the law. Is the law a neutral
arbiter? An instrument of repression? A tool of class interest? Is it
simply a product of time and place and of the values, attitudes, and
discourses of the powerful? Is it a closed or an open system? Is it even
amenable to reform, to serving the interests of justice as distinguished
from those of law? Is it fatally flawed by its own methodology and cast
of mind?

Explicitly signaled by the contributors, these questions are placed in
a wider context by supporting documentation: footnotes, brief
historiographical essays, and suggestions for further reading. Such
tools place issues of methodology and interpretation within the legal
historical scholarship of the Anglo-American common-law world. Presented
in a clean and readable typeface and blessedly free of typographical and
stylistic errors, this collection is likely to enjoy a sustained life on
undergraduate reading lists.