The Alberta Supreme Court at 100: History and Authority.

Christopher English is a history lecturer at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland and a recent law-school graduate.

A collection of essays on the first century of Alberta’s legal experience is welcome on several levels. It offers a useful and interesting perspective on a province which early signalled that it would be unlike the others. It fills a gap in the Osgoode Society for Legal History’s commitment to publishing essays which might serve as stepping stones toward historical monographs on specific aspects of Canadian law and, into the future, toward studies of regional or national legal history. It gives Albertan researchers and scholars a national platform by which they may become better known to practitioners at the other ends of the country. The collaboration at the publishers’ level between the Osgoode Society and the University of Alberta Press is a welcome initiative.

The nine essays offered here are highly creditable, exhaustively researched, carefully controlled, firmly stated, and engagingly written. The editing is impeccable. The volume offers an opportunity to discuss hypotheses which ground on professionalism, appointment to the province’s superior courts, judicial attitudes, legal reasoning, the interpretation of judicial precedent, and the influence of local societal beliefs, values, and attitudes. An appendix lists all appointees to the Supreme Court (1905) and court of appeal (1921). All were male until 1979.

Virtually all the contributors wrestle with the question of whether a century of legal experience points to a distinctive Albertan legal culture. Some do so rather defensively, sensitive to popular (outsider) stereotypes which centre on “the Wild West, peopled with redneck cowboys, sharp-eyed oilmen, social conservatives, and true believers on the political fringe.” The record of government policy, statute, and the common law was sometimes distinctive: no court action for divorce before 1917; untrammelled jurisdiction accorded to a Eugenics Board (repealed in 1972); sexual sterilization; and the exploitation of subsurface petroleum resources. On the other hand, Alberta courts recorded important and enlightened initiatives. In R. v. Cyr (1917) Alberta recognized the legal personhood of women, well ahead of the Persons Case in 1928. In that same year, two women took their seats in the legislature. Even when a petitioner was unsuccessful—an Irene Murdoch or a Delbert Vriend—the issues raised at trial reverberated across the country. From its earliest days, the courts set a high standard of legal competence. The first superior court judges were immigrants, largely from Ontario, but they were legally trained and tempered the law to take account of societal realities. Their defence of legality in the conscription crisis of 1918 was exciting and brave. Less controversially, but essentially principled, were the courts’ responses to the legal issues emanating from jurisdictional, corporate, and personal questions and grievances over oil, landholding (Hutterite settlements), water resources, Aboriginal hunting rights, energy, family law, and gender equality. Alberta may have been different, but it was neither unique nor a collection of regional stereotypes. These are interesting and important themes which have a larger national application.