Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Phillips, Jim
• Girard, Philip

Titel

Fifty Years of Canadian Legal History

Ist Teil von

• Dalhousie law journal, 2023-03, Vol.46 (1), p.1

Ort / Verlag

Dalhousie University Press Limited

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Fifty years ago Canadian legal history was very much in its infancy. What little had been published was in equal measure antiquarian, descriptive, and hagiographic. The field has undergone a profound transformation in the last half-century. We now know a great deal more about all aspects of our legal past, about our institutions, our legal personnel, and the substantive law. The field has also become much more sophisticated, concerned not only with internal legal developments but increasingly with the relationships between law and other aspects of Canadian history. Social history, labour history, women's history, economic, intellectual, cultural and political history, to name but a few, have come to be central themes in legal history just as historians in those fields have integrated the law into their analyses. This article cannot survey the field over fifty years in a comprehensive way, but uses four areas to illustrate the increasing complexity, sophistication and importance of Canadian legal history. Here we examine in some detail the development of the literature in four areas: the history of Canadian courts and judges, women's legal history, Indigenous peoples and the law, and the evolution of the civil law of Quebec within the broader framework of law in Canada. Each, albeit in different ways, demonstrates both that legal history and other forms of history are now effectively inseparable if one is to have a full and nuanced understanding of each.