G. Blaine Baker

The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire

The availability of the literature of the law, an aspect of legal culture rarely considered in twentieth century Canadian commentary on the ‘reception’ of imperial laws, must have had a great deal to do with the way that sources of law informed and reflected the developing jural values, doctrine, and methodology of the British North American provinces. Yet locally-prevalent versions of legal positivism, which find expression in formalistic, contemporary constitutional scholarship on transferral issues, have tended to suppress or render irrelevant inquiries into the way that such intellectual forces as law books actually affected the development of the legal culture of Upper Canada/Ontario.

Popularizing the Rule of Law: Sheldon Amos and the International Scientific Series, 1874 to 1909

Amos published the first edition of Science of Law with Appletons International Scientific Series in 1874. He emphasized the roles of empirical assembly and inductive synthesis in legal generalization, the capacity of juridical information to be presented in a systematic manner, Anglo-American common laws independence from politics, metaphysics and morality, and the facilitative role of law in social evolution. Amos thus traded on the conventions of the Victorian natural sciences to appeal to popular sentiment and thereby garner support for judge-made law and the rule of law, but the scientific conventions on which he traded had typically been filtered through and reconfigured by popular understandings of those sciences.

Willis on 'Cultured' Public Authorities

† I am grateful to Ian Hunter for helpful commentary on this essay, an earlier version of which was presented at the University of Toronto–Osgoode Hall Conference in Honour of John Willis in September 2004. 1 But see R.C.B. Risk, ‘Canadian Law Teachers in the 1930s: When the World Was Turned Upside Down’ (2004) 27 Dalhousie L.J. 1 at 33–48; Frank Iacobucci, ‘Articulating a Rational Standard of Review Doctrine: A Tribute to John Willis’ (2002) 27 Queen’s L.J. 859 at 860–4 [‘Articulating a Rational Standard’]; R. Blake Brown, ‘The Canadian Legal Realists and Administrative Law Scholarship, 1930–1941’ (2000) 9 Dalhousie J.Leg.Stud. 36 at 47–53; R.C.B. Risk, ‘Here Be Cold and Tygers: A Map of Statutory Interpretation in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s’ (2000) 63 Sask.L.Rev. 195 at 204–5; R.C.B. Risk, ‘In Memoriam: John Willis’ (1997) 47 U.T.L.J. 301; R.C.B. Risk, ‘Volume 1 of the Journal: A Tribute and a Belated Review’ (1987) 37 U.T.L.J. 193 at 201–3.