Girard Philip - A History of Law in Canada

When you spend as long on a book project as we have on this one you incur many and varied debts, material and personal. We should begin by thanking the institutions that funded the research the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in particular, and also the Law Foundation of Ontario, Osgoode Hall Law School, the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

Individually or collectively we presented aspects of this book at a variety of fora, and always received a generous reception and stimulating and helpful critiques. We thank those in attendance at meetings of the Canadian Law and Society Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Australia/New Zealand Legal History Society, the Canadian Legal History conference at the University of Calgary, and the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop. We also thank the law schools at Queens, Manitoba, Victoria, and Lakehead Universities, and the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, for invitations to speak and the attendees there for their helpful comments.

In the summer of 2016 we held a one-day workshop on a draft of this manuscript, and thank all the attendees for taking the time to read the manuscript and improve it greatly. A particular debt of thanks goes to those who travelled to Toronto for that workshop: Constance Backhouse from Ottawa, Lori Chambers from Thunder Bay, Michael Grossberg from Indiana, and Michel Morin from Montreal.

Because two of us are officers of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History other people from the Society had to perform the roles normally played by the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor. We are indebted to Justice Robert Sharpe, President of the Society, and Dr Mary Stokes, a director, for shepherding the manuscript through the external review process with aplomb, and for reading and commenting on it themselves. Amanda Campbell, Administrator of the Osgoode Society, was instrumental in making this process run smoothly. We also are most grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their very perceptive reading of, and detailed comments on, the manuscript.

A number of colleagues read parts of this manuscript in its final stages and provided very useful suggestions. We are grateful to Don Fyson, Douglas Hay, Jacquie Briggs, Carolyn Podruchny, Naiomi Metallic, and, especially, Jeff McNairn for their assistance and encouragement. Lori Chambers deserves special mention here, for she read not parts but the entire manuscript.

Nobody does academic publishing as well as the University of Toronto Press, and we were greatly assisted in getting this book out by Len Husband, Canadian history editor, and Wayne Herrington, associate managing editor. All of us have worked with Len and Wayne before, and again they did a superb job. The copy editor tasked by the Press with doing this book, Ian MacKenzie, was new to us, and excellent in every way. The index was prepared by Dr Justin Irwin, a student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.