When the men who came to be known as the Fathers of Confederation met in Quebec City to try to hammer out an arrangement for the union of their respective colonies, it was not clear whether the tide was turning toward or away from large polities. In Europe, the progress of Italian and German unification seemed to bode well for larger…
Philip Girard
Philip Girard is the author of Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life (University of Toronto Press, 2005). He teaches at Osgoode Law School.
Articles by
Philip Girard
If you read only English-language print media, you may just barely recall a reference to La Bataille de Londres: Dessous, secrets et coulisses du rapatriement constitutionnel when it came out in April of this year. In this retelling of the patriation saga of 1978–82 Frédéric Bastien argues for the critical importance of the British side of the…
Messy, Experimental and Stimulating
The common law we live by is more than a slow tweaking of precedents. June 2011
The common law, made up of thousands of individual decisions taken over centuries, has often threatened to overwhelm its practitioners. In the 19th century a new form of legal literature tackled this problem: the study of “leading cases.” The authors of such works advised aspirant lawyers that any given area of law was based on a few fundamental…