Down the other night to the always lively annual Toronto book launch of the remarkable legal history society, the Osgoode Society. The Society's website has details of the books -- thanks to our blogalum Mary Stokes.
Notable, maybe, is John McLaren's Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered, an exploration of the curiously interesting ways in which colonial judges got fired by their political masters in the nineteenth century. The theme is the independence (or lack of it) in the judiciary -- and McLaren is relentlessly comparative, exploring how the process worked (often with the same judges) in Australia, Sierra Leone, and the British Caribbean as well as the British North American colonies. So much so, in fact, that the book is simultaneously being published in Australia by its relatively new Forbes Society for Australian Legal History, itself inspired by the success of the Osgoode Society here.
Saw in the crowd two Ontario appeal court judges who had been predicted for the Supreme Court of Canada vacancies: Robert Sharpe, who had a (terrific) book being launched, and Andromache Karakatsanis. Sharpe is not going to Ottawa, Karakatsanis is, and it was hard to tell which one of them looked most pleased with that outcome.
