Philip Girard

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…

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…

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…

Like a Crown prosecutor disclosing evidence to the defence at the beginning of a trial, Fred Kaufman tells the reader in the preface to Searching for Justice: An Autobiography that a professional editor who reviewed the first draft reached less than effusively. “Published or not,” she advised, “the end product will be … archivally…

Media interest in history is triggered almost exclusively by anniversaries: the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec, the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel and other such occasions provide the excuse for a little historical reflection on the evening news or in newspaper editorials. Historians and academic presses have tried to capitalize on this trend by preparing works timed for publication to coincide with the anniversary in…