I spent part of the weekend very comfortably hosted at Osgoode Hall Law School's downtown centre and the University of Toronto's Faculty Club for Reimagining Justice: A Conference in Honour of Constance Backhouse, Jim Philips and Philip Girard.
The conference was a celebration of the thriving state of legal history in Canada and of three still-active scholars who have done much to make that so -- by their scholarship but even more by their work to build and sustain an informal scholarly community admired by its membership for how collegial, supporting, diverse, and effective its various gatherings and projects always seem to be.
One reason for why that is so is that the legal history community has always included law professors, history professors, and scholars from other disciplines, and also independent scholars, legal practitioners, and members of the judiciary. Somehow that turns out to be a good thing. Among a range of presentations of very specialized topics in legal history, for instance, one panel included a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Chief Justice of Ontario, and two other eminent judges discussing the significance of legal history for their jurisprudence.
Another reason for the healthy state of legal history is the existence of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Supported by a similar mix of members, it is a highly effective publishing arm for Canadian legal history (some 135 books since 1979) that gives potential legal historians confidence in having somewhere to publish.
Phillips and Girard are the Society's editors-in-chief. They are also co-authors with R. Blake Brown of the groundbreaking History of Law in Canada, the third volume of which is soon to be published. Backhouse's many works are the backbone of feminist legal history in Canada and her networks and protegés are practically a conference in themselves.
The organizers of this conference, all veteran conference organizers, said in some amazement that getting this one set up was actually "fun." As a sometime part-time legal historian, it is indeed the collegiality of the legal history people that keeps me coming back to events like these.
