Making Law, Order, and Authority in British Columbia, 1821-1871

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

Historians of Canada, particularly legal historians, will welcome this
analysis of the assumptions and goals underpinning the legal regime of
British Columbia. The project exhibits the strengths of a
monograph—depth, an impressive control of the literature in the field,
and a wealth of critical analysis. At the same time it offers a somewhat
narrow topical perspective—the role of liberalism in shaping the law,
and through the law the sort of society, government, and economy the
European immigrants wanted—and so risks distorting the overall
context, the embracing geographical, cultural, and political setting in
which legal initiatives were tested and refined.

The form of liberalism examined here emphasized individual rights,
personal responsibility for one’s own welfare, a free marketplace in a
climate conducive to individual initiative, and business relations based
on private contract. The law and its officials, institutions, processes,
and values were to facilitate the achievement of these goals by
providing a dispassionate forum for the settlement of disputes, with
rules that would be clear, uniform, rational, and predictable. Grounded
in legislation, and given continuity and reliability by judicial
precedent and the “black-letter law” of scholarly treatises, the law
proved a popular arbiter of personal disputes. As a result, it
contributed to personal and collective progress.

The success of this view of law, which many today might term naive, did
not go uncontested at the time. Loo presents case studies in which some
of the protagonists argued for a legal regime that would more readily
accept local realities and needs, or reflect collective values rather
than individual values and market-driven laissez-faire. It is among the
strengths of this closely argued study that it provides nicely crafted,
sometimes lyrical narratives of the leading cases in which alternative
conceptions of law and legal decision-making were at issue. The
complexities of these are sometimes insufficiently examined, but the
author cautions that this is so.

On the legal issues at stake and on legal terminology, the book, on the
whole, is a reliable guide, although the nonprofessional reader may wish
for more precise explanations of legal terms. Nonetheless, this welcome
study is ground-breaking, interesting, and entertaining.