Consolidated as of April 17, 1982.

This comprehensive study is concerned primarily with the fundamental problem of the role of the judiciary in the federal system of Canadian government. The author criticizes previous accounts of the Judicial Committee’s interpretative scheme for the British North American Act because of their neglect of underlying jurisprudential assumptions and their readiness to accept the textual criticisms levelled in the O’Connor Report of 1939; they fail to note the relationship between the jurisprudential and the textual aspects. Professor Browne is convinced that O’Connor’s criticism is as ill founded as the alternative interpretive scheme he proposed, and that the “three-compartment” view represents the most convincing construction of sections 91 and 92 of the Act. He considers debatable the “organic statute” argument widely accepted in the United States and becoming more and more popular in Canada; and supports the premium which English courts have traditionally placed on certainty and stability in the law. Professor Browne concludes that the almost universal criticism in Canada of the Judicial Committee’s construction of the BNA Act is basically misconceived: Canadian jurists should think carefully before following trends set by American courts, for American purposes, in the context of American law, particularly when the repercussions of those trends are not as yet fully appreciated. This discussion will be of special interest for legal, political, and historical studies in this country, the United States, and other Commonwealth countries, especially those which have federal systems and consequently share the same basic problems of the judiciary in such a system.

This provocative book explains how divergent views of Canada's past have sown dissension between Qu?b?cois and other Canadians, disclosing a lost middle ground between the Canadian nationalist and Qu?bec nationalist visions of Canadian history.

American, European, political, and theological histories intersect in this important new exploration of the founding of the United States. The Covenant Connection examines the way in which the Protestant Reformation and federal covenant theology, which lay at the foundation of Reformed Protestantism in its Calvinist version, played a major role in shaping the political life and ideas of the colonies of British North America and ultimately the new United States of America. Contributors to the volume look at the most critical facets of this connection over nearly three centuries, from the beginning of the Reformation in sixteenth-century Zurich to the declaration of American independence and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Individual chapters show how federal theology led to a revival of Biblical republicanism in Reformation Europe; how it was applied and modified in countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England; and how it was carried across the Atlantic by the early settlers of North Americamost particularly the Puritans but also other groups such as the Dutch and the Scottishto form the matrix for American constitutionalism, democratic republicanism, and federalism. As a collection, The Covenant Connection provides an irrefutable analysis of the profound biblical and Reformation influences on the founding of America.