The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop is an informal evening seminar, starting at 6.30 p.m., and conducted over zoom. Participants are graduate students and faculty in law and history from U of T, York, McMaster and other institutions, as well as lawyers, judges and law students. All law students with an interest in legal history are welcome. Law students may also take the workshop for credit – see Course List.
If you would like to be put on the mailing list and to receive the papers, please send an email to j.phillips@utoronto.ca.
2025-26 Schedule
Wednesday September 3: Andrea Mckenzie, University of Victoria: “Off the Record and Between the Lines: the Shorthand of George Treby, c. 1668-1700" .
Wednesday September 17: James Barry, Osgoode Hall Law School: ‘"John Reeves's Chart of Penal Law, 1779: Exhibiting the law 'at one view'."
Wednesday October 1: James Muir and Karine de Champlain, University of Alberta: "Confederation histories and originalism in Canada".
Wednesday October 15: Constance Backhouse, University of Ottawa, will present the first annual R. Roy McMurtry lecture in Canadian Legal History. Details tba. Please see the Osgoode Society website osgoodesociety.ca.
Wednesday October 15: Li Chen, University of Toronto: “Technocratic Governance, Invisible Power, and Juridical Capital in Late Imperial China.”
Wednesday October 29: Reading Week
Wednesday November 12: Kate Reeve, Columbia University: “Novel Rights:
Indigenous Property in the Settler Empire.”
Wednesday November 26: Nick Rogers, York University: ‘Infanticide in Georgian Bristol and Bath”.
Wednesday January 7: Mélanie Méthot, University of Alberta: “McLeod vs New South Wales Attorney General : When guilt has nothing to do with Law.”
Wednesday January 21: Richard Manning, McMaster University: “A Ruffianly Species of Amusement”: Youth Transgression and Gang Behaviour in the Late 19th and Early 20th centuries.
Wednesday February 4: Heidi Bohaker, University of Toronto: ‘Ontario Treaties”.
Wednesday February 18: Reading Week
Wednesday March 4: Elsbeth Heaman, McGill University: ‘The limits of law and the workings of history in Jacob Viner’s classic Dumping (1923).’
Wednesday March 18: Jean-Christophe Bedard-Rubin, University of Toronto: "Municipalities, Pre-Commitment, and Self-Government in Nineteenth Century British Imperial Thought."
Wednesday April 1: Chandra Murdoch, University of Toronto: “ ‘My matter is overlooked because I have no vote’: Indigenous women hiring legal professionals in Southern Ontario inheritance cases, 1884-1900."