It is an authoritative and lively history of the Law Society of Upper Canada and of Ontario's lawyers, from the founding of the Society by ten lawyers in 1797, to the crises which shook the society and the legal profession in the mid-1990s.

A History of Law in Canada is the first of two volumes. Volume one begins at a time just prior to European contact and continues to the 1860s, while volume two will start with Confederation and end at approximately 2000. The history of law includes substantive law, legal institutions, legal actors, and legal culture. The authors assume that since 1500 there have been three legal systems in Canada - the Indigenous, the French, and the English. At all times, these systems have co-existed and interacted, with the relative power and influence of each being more or less dominant in different periods. The history of law cannot be treated in isolation, and this book examines law as a dynamic process, shaped by and affecting other histories over the long term. The law guided and was guided by economic developments, was influenced and moulded by the nature and trajectory of political ideas and institutions, and variously exacerbated or mediated intercultural exchange and conflict. These themes are apparent in this examination, and through most areas of law including land settlement and tenure, and family, commercial, constitutional, and criminal law.

“It’s a girl!” the Ontario press announced, as Canada’s first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers for the next six decades, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession. Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers called to the bar from 1897 to 1957, revealing the legal profession’s gendered patterns. Comprising a small handful of students—or even a single student—at the Law School, women were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, Black, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades. This longitudinal study of women lawyers’ gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created—or foreclosed on—women lawyers’ professional success. The book’s final section explores how some current women lawyers, despite their increased numbers, must remain “quiet rebels” to succeed.

Though Cohen rose to the top of his profession, he had a difficult, complex private life that contributed to his personal disgrace and professional downfall.

This is the second of three volumes in an important collection that recounts the sweeping history of law in Canada. The period covered in this volume witnessed both continuity and change in the relationships among law, society, Indigenous peoples, and white settlers. The authors explore how law was as important to the building of a new urban industrial nation as it had been to the establishment of colonies of agricultural settlement and resource exploitation. The book addresses the most important developments in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, including legal pluralism and the co-existence of European and Indigenous law. It pays particular attention to the Métis and the Red River Resistance, the Indian Act, and the origins and expansion of residential schools in Canada. The book is divided into four parts: the law and legal institutions; Indigenous peoples and Dominion law; capital, labour, and criminal justice; and those less favoured by the law. A History of Law in Canada examines law as a dynamic process, shaped by and affecting other histories over the long term.

In any account of twentieth-century Canadian law, Bora Laskin (1912-1984) looms large. Born in northern Ontario to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Laskin became a prominent human rights activist, university professor, and labour arbitrator before embarking on his 'accidental career' as a judge on the Ontario Court of Appeal (1965) and later Chief Justice of Canada (1973-1984). Throughout his professional career, he used the law to make Canada a better place for workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and the disadvantaged. As a judge, he sought to make the judiciary more responsive to modern Canadian expectations of justice and fundamental rights. In Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life, Philip Girard chronicles the life of a man who, at all points of his life, was a fighter for a better Canada: he fought antisemitism, corporate capital, omnipotent university boards, the Law Society of Upper Canada, and his own judicial colleagues in an effort to modernize institutions and re-shape Canadian law. Girard exploits a wealth of previously untapped archival sources to provide, in vivid detail, a critical assessment of a restless man on an important mission.

Bar Codes examines women lawyers' attempts to reconcile their professional obligations with other aspects of their lives. It charts the life courses of women who constitute a first wave -- an avant-garde -- in a profession designed by men, for men, where formal codes of conduct and subtle cultural norms promote masculine values. A thorough analysis of women’s encounters with this culture provides some answers and raises more questions about the kinds of stresses that have become extreme in the lives of many Canadian women. This book adds to mounting evidence of marked gender differences in opportunities for advancement, demonstrating that many men still enjoy freedom from domestic responsibilities while women continue to face multiple barriers in their quest for career success. As this study shows, change is under way in the legal profession and women can succeed in reaching high levels within it, but the law remains, in many ways, a masculine institution.