Essays in the History of Canadian Law in Honour of RCB Risk

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.

A festschrift marking the retirement R.C.B. Risk, a leading teacher of
Canadian legal history marks a new stage in the development and
consolidation of the discipline. Risk in 1973 was the first to offer a
“Prospectus for Canadian Legal History: [it] should be respectable and
flourishing, but it is not. ... We know almost nothing about our legal
past.” His call was issued from Halifax rather than his home base in
Toronto, underlining the need for an approach that was both regional and
national, and which came five years before the founding of the Osgoode
Society whose original mandate reflected an Ontario focus. Even then,
Risk anticipated themes that in this celebratory volume reappear,
clothed in detail by the research of his peers and four former students.
They have been selected from the much larger conference program that
honored Risk’s accomplishments in 1998.

The 14 substantive essays are widely researched and persuasively
argued. Thematically, they are typical of the discipline today: race
(three essays); the legal profession (three); the process of criminal
and civil cases (two); case studies in corporate, labor, and
administrative law (four); the intellectual foundations of law (two). In
a summative survey, G. Blaine Baker probes Risk’s approaches and
publications, reflecting his “central position in modern Canadian
legal historiography.”

The editors’ selection of what to publish from the conference
proceedings was undoubtedly conditioned by factors a reviewer can only
guess at. Only three of the 18 authors are women; half the essays deal
with Ontario topics; and there are no case studies on Quebec, the
Prairies, the North, New Brunswick, or Newfoundland. The false
impression that the profession is overwhelmingly male, anglophone, and
Ontario-dominated might have been allayed by the summarizing of the
original conference program. Nevertheless, this volume, number 39 in the
45 issued by the Osgoode Society since 1981, reflects the giant strides
made by the discipline, and Risk’s important contribution to that
progress.