Book Awards

The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better by Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie, won the 2024 PROSE Award in the category of Legal Studies and Criminology, presented by the Association of American Publishers. It was also shortlisted for the 2023 Donner Prize, which honors the best public policy book by a Canadian author.

Law today is incomplete, inaccessible, unclear, underdeveloped, and often perplexing to those whom it affects. In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

The book Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation received four awards:

• Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize (2023)
• High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writer (2023)
• Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and Concordia University First Book Prize (2023)
• John W. Dafoe Book Prize (2023)
• Manitoba Historical Society Margaret McWilliams Book Award for Local History (2022)

In his review of this book Michael Ignatieff wrote "This is a magnificent book. It’s a new history of Canada, as lived in two communities—Rossburn and Waywayseecappo—who shared the same valley but never lived the same reality. I am haunted by what I learned and touched by the hope that these communities can teach us all how to live together in peace and justice. A truly extraordinary achievement: peeling back the layers of the history, searching through the records, but never once losing the characters, the detail, the grit of lives lived. I'm just so impressed."

Professor Jim Phillips and his co-authors were awarded the W. Wesley Pue Book Prize in 2023 for their book A History of Law in Canada, Volume II: Law for the New Dominion, 1867 to 1914.

The jury citation said the authors have “significantly contributed to law and society scholarship with a monumental book of legal history. Comprehensive and meticulously sourced, Phillips, Girard and Brown illustrate how plural legal orders – Indigenous law, common law and civil law – were impacted by the process of developing and consolidating a national legal order in Canada, and how fundamental aspects of the Canadian legal order took form between 1867 and 1914. Such a new and outstanding work in law and society is absolutely deserving of the CLSA’s W. Wesley Pue Book Prize.”

Kant and the Law of War is a major intervention into just war theory from the most influential contemporary interpreter and exponent of Kant's political and legal theories. The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers appeal to ideas drawn from Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not yet been brought into their proper place in these debates. Professor Ripstein argues that a special morality governs war because of its distinctive immorality: the wrongfulness of entering or remaining in a condition in which force decides everything provides the standards for evaluating the grounds of initiating war, the ways in which wars are fought, and the results of past wars.

Kant and the Law of War was awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy's Book Prize for the best book in the history of philosophy published in 2021.

Law’s Indigenous Ethics examines the revitalization of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to their own laws and, in so doing, attempts to enrich Canadian constitutional law more generally. Organized around the seven Anishinaabe grandmother and grandfather teachings of love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect, this book explores ethics in relation to Aboriginal issues including title, treaties, legal education, and residential schools. With characteristic depth and sensitivity, Professor John Borrows brings insights drawn from philosophy, law, and political science to bear on some of the most pressing issues that arise in contemplating the interaction between Canadian state law and Indigenous legal traditions. In the course of a wide-ranging but accessible inquiry, he discusses such topics as Indigenous agency, self-determination, legal pluralism, and power. In its use of Anishinaabe stories and methodologies drawn from the emerging field of Indigenous studies, Law’s Indigenous Ethics makes a significant contribution to scholarly debate and is an essential resource for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Indigenous rights, societies, and cultures.
 

Law’s Indigenous Ethics won the Canadian Law and Society Association's Wesley Pue Book Prize in 2020.

Dealing with Losers: The Political Economy of Policy Transitions won the Donner Book Prize in 2014.  In this book, Professor Trebilcock explores both normative and political rationales for transition cost mitigation strategies and explains which strategies might create an aggregate, overall enhancement in societal welfare beyond mere compensation. He highlights the political rationales for mitigating such costs and the ability of potential losers to mobilize and obstruct socially beneficial changes in the absence of well-crafted transition cost mitigation strategies.