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CONSTANCE BACKHOUSE. Toronto: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History / University of Toronto Press 1999. Pp. xiii, 485, illus. $60.00 cloth, $27.50 paper
In a spring 1992 review article in Acadiensis, Greg Marquis, one of several historians quoted anonymously in the introduction to this book, observed regretfully that 'the author of a recent major contribution in Canadian legal history holds an LLB and an LLM not an MA or a Ph.D. in history.' He was, of course, referring to Constance Backhouse, professor of law at the University of Ottawa and author of Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto 1991), a classic of feminist legal history. In more recent years Backhouse has turned her attention to the interpenetration of gender, class, and race, and she has now produced a volume of six historical case studies on 'race,' rights, and the law in Canadian courts. I allude here to the title of James Walker's 1997 book (also from The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History) because Backhouse's volume of essays in the history of Canadian racism is really volume 2 to Walker's volume 1. 'Racism' is as conspicuous by its presence in the title of Backhouse's book as by its absence from the title of Walker's. Each work consists of a series of stand-alone historical case studies - four from Walker, six from Backhouse. All of Walker's cases reached the Supreme Court of Canada, compared with only one of Backhouse's. Two of the cases to which Walker devotes a chapter apiece (Quong Wing v. R. and Christie v. York Corporation) are each given two pages by Backhouse. These twin books addressing an identical theme and in the same format are companion pieces and must be read in tandem. Though methodologically their approach is similar, Backhouse is far...