Book Notes: the Osgoode Society books for 2026

Went downtown last night to Osgoode Hall for the annual book launch event of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, back in those august premises  after a few years in anonymous office tower gathering places.  The hall's Convocation Hall is one of my favorite rooms in all the world, both for itself and for my own associations with it over the years of dabbling in legal history.  It attracted a large crowd too:  lawyers, scholars, judges, publishing folk, historians, students, authors -- the diverse group that legal history seems to draw around itself.  The society was founded in 1979 and as of yesterday has published 135 substantial  and eclectic works of legal history.

Back in September, I noted one of this year's six books, distinguished civil litigation lawyer Earl Cherniak's In the Courts, which I had seen in advance. A couple more particularly caught my eye last night.

Making A Killing: Murder and Life Insurance in 1890s Ontario, by UToronto emeritus professor of history Ian Radforth is partly about the emergence of the life insurance industry in Canada -- where names like Sun Life, Canada Life, Manual Life and the other came from -- and partly about the emerrgence of a new kind of crime:  taking out a huge life policy on someone and then killing then in order to collect a fortune from the life insurance company.

Radforth explained last night that he was grateful that several of these people were very bad at murder -- so that they were quickly apprehended and put on trial, thereby giving him the records from which to document this odd corner of the insurance industry.  (He noted that there were no doubt some smarter insurance-policy murderers who never got caught and left no evidence behind for him.)

Evidently Making a Killing is a mix of a serious business history and a lurid crime story -- and I'm looking forward to getting into it.

I had not immediately tagged In The Shadow of the Manhattan Project.  It turns out to be kind of a banger too, for a serious academic legal history, anyway.  One of the co-authors Robert Bothwell (another UT History emeritus) wrote an official history of the uranium and radium mining firm Eldorado (nationalized during World War II) back in 1984.  Turns out that he had to leave out some substantial parts of the story, because there had been a lot of chicanery and criming all around the Eldorado story, and in 1984 the malefactors were alive and acquitted of all charges, creating libel problems any book publisher would be determined to avoid.

Now the principals are all dead and cannot be libelled.  So Bothwell partnered with a former PhD student of his turned legal star, Patricia McMahon, to explore how a trio of Eldorado insiders managed to make off with Eldorado money to the tune of about $50 million in 2026 dollars.  I'm looking forward to getting into that story.

Both books suggest something of the value of a dedicated legal history publishing society like the Osgoode.  Neither the insurance industry nor the rare-earths mining industry, significant though they both are, necessarily sound like the liveliest corners of legal history.  But a smidgen of murder, crime, and legal chicanery can really add some life to the story.  The Osgoode Society has midwifed dozens such works over its not quite fifty years.