The authors set themselves a daunting task in this admirable book, the initial offering in a longer ambitious project on the history of law in Canada. This volume provides a survey of northern North America's legal history, emphasizing its mixture of First Nations/Indigenous elements, European influences, post-Conquest and post-Revolutionary adaptations, and, finally, the evolutions of second empire British North America to 1866, while offering impressions of “Canada's” legal cultures up to the eve of Confederation a year later. Their success is measured in an engaging and accessible argument that raises important questions about the colonial legacies that continue to shape and inform contemporary debate, policy, and interpretation of the law in Canada, especially at it relates to the country's First Nations peoples. In that sense, A History of Law in Canada is a cogent reminder that historical analysis represents a way of thinking about how the present came to be.

It is a physically large book (more than 900 pages), organized chronologically into four parts that are thematically subdivided. For example, Part One: Introduction (1–25) contains four chapters, the first of which sets out methodological, theoretical, interpretative, and historiographical frameworks, followed by distinct chapters on the Indigenous, French, and English legal traditions. From the outset, the authors’ layered methodology provides insights into how, by accident and design, these traditions became interwoven. Here we see vibrant systems of law and legal thought shaping, and being shaped by, the surrounding environment. The effect is impressive, and Part One's 80 page length would fit nicely as a reading assignment in a legal history course.

In Part Two: European Chartered Enterprise, New France, and the Encounter with Indigenous Law (83–171), readers are introduced to the era of European proprietary companies encountering Indigenous nations on the Atlantic coast and along the St Lawrence to the Great Lakes from 1500 to 1701. Part Three: The Long Eighteenth Century, extending from 1701 to 1815 (175–370), explains the establishment of French and then English royal government as institutional legal structures, policies, and practices tread the delicate line between adherence to the mother country's legal norms and the demands of life lived in distant colonies. Part Four: British North America spanning the years from 1815 to the 1860s, (373–706) closes the book with a description of the era in which local legal personnel, elected assemblies, and the emergence of state apparatus translate the common law into statutory form while tailoring its meanings to reflect the needs of diverse settler and, to a lesser degree, Indigenous communities.

Framed in this fashion, the book offers two broad interpretative themes. The first is legal pluralism, which is read and applied in multiple and nuanced ways in the work. First, the authors construe the French and English legal worlds as pluralistic, given that both combined royal authority, traditional prescription, and customary norms. However, because our understanding of First Nations’ legal systems tends to be particular rather than general, it is difficult to state with certainty that their pre-contact legal systems functioned in a fashion that would have aligned with a European, let alone a contemporary, definition of legal pluralism. What can be said is that in their engagement with the European newcomers, specific North American First Nation communities certainly embraced a more Western style of legal pluralism. The authors hasten to add that as much as some contemporary sensibilities might celebrate legal pluralism, it was not an unmixed good. Each legal system provided examples in which adherence to traditional “legal” practice thwarted opportunities for reform and revitalization. This, the authors refer to as “the long good-bye” (8), the idea being that the law sometimes operated as a vehicle for hanging onto something long past its best buy date. Pluralism could facilitate this urge and act as a brake on needed reform. The point is important. As much as it is helpful to understand how pluralism influenced thinking about law and legal practice in northern North America, it equally valuable to understand how it also created challenges and difficulties that infused the emergent “Canadian” legal cultures.

The second theme is liberty and order. Here too is a fine balance. From a European perspective, much of early North American social, political, economic, and legal history turned on questions of liberty and order. As the book demonstrates, within the various nations, as well as among those communities, absolutes entailing liberty or order were mercurial. How liberty might function meant something different for First Nations individuals, community leaders, habitants, French merchants, traders, and church officials. Not surprisingly, order was also a contested notion inflected by affiliated identities (French, English, Haudenosaunee, Mi'kmaq, or Huron-Wendat), gender, race/ethnicity, religion, region, class, and other demographic factors. These tensions were complicated. For example, in discussing sources of law in common law jurisdictions, the authors note that those judges who insisted that they were bound by English authority nonetheless acknowledged that local conditions could undermine strict application. And despite their Anglophilia, these same judges sometimes tolerated the insight of American jurists, given the commonality of North American conditions. Also evident were generational shifts explaining how a nationalistic defense of seigneurial-land tenure could justify rebellion in 1837/38, before being abandoned in an early 1850s embrace of increased economic liberty. Like legal pluralism, the interpretative theme of liberty and order contributed to challenging debates about the meanings of law and law reform as the British North American colonies became increasingly confident in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Individual chapters explore women and the law, public law, private law, marriage and the family, constitutional law, slavery, race and legacies for Black British North Americans, criminal law, procedure, the judiciary, courts, law reform, law reporting, the rising importance of statute law and corporations, and the economy. Throughout, we are left with the impression that despite a shared loyalty to the English crown, diverse points of origin engendered an oftentimes discordant legal history. New France, Acadia, and Quebec/Lower Canada followed a similar path that managed to differ yet sometimes align with developments in the colonies of English origin. Although a single “Canadian” legal history or legal culture was unlikely to emerge from such an environment, common responses and perspectives do. One was an ever-cautious approach to change. Thus, when faced with legislation facilitating the creation of corporations, Upper Canadian leader, Robert Baldwin, conceded that the incorporation of companies was very desirable although it was equally important that no injury should be done to individuals nor should there be relief of responsibility for paying one's debts. Essentially he offered resounding, yet qualified, “Canadian” support (619).

A second major characteristic in the book and hence, in the law, is land. For most of the years covered in this volume, the First Nations peoples of northern North American retained control over their land base and, through that, control over much of their lives. The changes introduced through and by the Europeans could be classified as non-directed legal change in which the community could accommodate the novelty without surrendering its sovereignty and could do so without grave risk. However, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Ghent (1814), the First Nations in the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies found themselves under increasing pressure. Whether they lost land through the reserve system instituted under the French regime, by formal land surrenders in Upper Canada, or by settler intrusion as occurred in Lower Canada and the Atlantic colonies, the process signaled a fundamental shift. Having been relegated to the margins of settler agricultural society and facing the loss of their standing as military allies, First Nations and their legal systems receded in importance in the Euro-Canadian mind. This did not mean, however, that these systems disappeared. Rather, ordinary conflict resolution within First Nations communities remained beyond the reach of Euro-Canadian courts. It was this resilience that became the target of colonial administrators who sought to use education and religion to compel Indigenous peoples to abandon these traditional ways in favor of sedentary agriculture and the dictates of White society and governance. The legacies of these efforts extend well beyond the book's time frame to the twenty-first century and Canada's initial steps toward substantive reconciliation with First Nations peoples. Land also mattered to the European newcomers and their descendants. This was evident in the end of seigneurial land tenure in Lower Canada, managing “alien” title and clergy reserves in Upper Canada, uprooting landlordism in Prince Edward Island (a task not completed until the Supreme Court of Canada's first reported judgement in 1877), the squatting legacies in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and the judicial recognition of local custom in land possession in Newfoundland. All these testified to the pressing need to seek out answers to a welter of questions arising out of the peculiarities of the various colonial regimes and how their characteristics gave birth to a variety of questions concerning land possession and tenancy, as well as the rights and obligations of land ownership.

Authors Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, and R. Blake Brown have crafted a thought-provoking volume that should be required reading for all Canadian legal historians, and advised reading for anyone interested in northern North American legal history. Further, given its relevance to a variety of fields and subdisciplines, the book deserves the attention of any North American historian drawn to First Nations, colonial, social, political, or economic history. The book is well worth sustained attention. Unsurprisingly, and given the standards that the organization has maintained over the past 40 years, the book is also another example of the excellent scholarship produced under the egis of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and, in that, represents an admirable benchmark for the promised future volume surveying the post-Confederation era and its legacies of legal pluralism and balances struck between liberty and order.