The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop is an informal evening seminar, starting at 6.30 p.m., and conducted over zoom. Participants are graduate students and faculty in law and history from U of T, York, McMaster and other institutions, as well as lawyers, judges and law students. All law students with an interest in legal history are welcome. Law students may also take the workshop for credit – see Course List.

If you would like to be put on the mailing list and to receive the papers, please send an email to j.phillips@utoronto.ca.

2023-24 Schedule

Fall Term 2023

DatePresenterSubject
Wednesday, September 13 Preston Lim, Villanova UniversityThe Great Depression and Canada’s Originalist Decade.
Wednesday September 27Patrick Ryan, Western UniversityEugenic Continuities: Youth, Disability, and Common Law Sterilization.
Wednesday October 11John Weaver, McMaster University“Private Law” Development in an Ageless Enterprise: Maritime Arbitration, 1200-2000.
Wednesday October 25Nicole O’Byrne and KarenMcGill, University of New BrunswickThe history of the New Brunswick-First Nations Tax Revenue Sharing Agreements.
Wednesday November 8Daniel Rûck, University of Ottawa'Making Sure They Lost': The role of the Department of Indian Affairs in Kahnawà:ke’s dispossession of St. Nicholas Island, 1907-1920.
Wednesday November 22Mike Borsk, Queen’s UniversityRule of Law, Rules of Experts: Surveyors and Courts in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Region.
Wednesday December 6Rob Konduros, Hilborn & KondurosBritain Won the Military Battle but lost the Cultural War: The Context and Historiography of Responsible Government and the Origin of the Colonial Laws Validity Act.

Winter Term 2024

DatePresenterSubject
Wednesday January 10Jeff McNairn, Queen’s University“Whether Subject to Parish Laws:” Direct Taxation, Indigenous Peoples, and Settler Sovereignty in Upper Canada to 1850.
Wednesday January 24Dan Rohde, Harvard UniversityThe Founding of the Bank of Canada: A Legal History.
Wednesday February 7Carolyn Strange, Australian National UniversityDivided Decisions: R. v. Fitton (1956) in Appeal.
Wednesday February 14Roger Fisher, York UniversityHaydn, Pleyel and Copyright in Music in late Eighteenth-Century England: A Reassessment of Forster v. Longman
Wednesday March 6Kiera Mitchell, University of Saskatchewan“The Better Half”: Farming Women’s Labour, Marital Property Division, and Rural Activism in Murdoch v. Murdoch.
Wednesday March 20Valerie Korinek, University of SaskatchewanLegalizing same-sex marriage in Canada: A Brief History.
Wednesday April 3Andrew Johnston, University of VictoriaA Uniform Practice, in Uniform: Royal Navy Officers’ Views on the Reform of Naval Law in Mid-Nineteenth Century North America.