Research Seminar in Cdn. Legal History: The Development of Legal Doctrine in Ontario Court of Appeal (LAW354H1F)

This course will permit students interested in doing original research in Canadian legal history the opportunity to do so, in conjunction with a history of the Ontario Court of Appeal being written by Christopher Moore. In the initial 6 weeks of the course students will read and discuss work on appellate court histories generally, on the development of legal doctrine by superior courts in the common law world, and on the history of the Ontario Court of Appeal. The other 6 weeks will comprise presentations by students of drafts of their research papers.

The research papers for this course will each examine one aspect of the development of legal doctrine in the Ontario Court of Appeal. All areas of law will be covered (although by no means comprehensively), as will all periods of the court’s history from the establishment of the Court of Error and Appeal in 1849 until c. 2000 (although individual papers will be much more limited in temporal scope). A list of topics will be distributed at the beginning of the course, topics which will have been determined by the instructors to be broad enough to make a contribution to our understanding of the history of the court and narrow enough to be feasible given time constraints. The list will include subjects such as: the reception of Donoghue v. Stevenson in the OCA; the OCA and capital punishment appeals; the OCA and the reception of the married women’s property acts; early approaches to the BNA Act, etc. Students may also choose their own topic, with the permission of the instructors. Assuming the papers are of sufficient quality, they will be edited and published by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.