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.

2024-2025 Schedule

Fall Term 2024

DatePresenterSubject
Wednesday, September 11 Nina Patti and Jim Phillips, University of TorontoThe 1930 Divorce Act: The Demise of Parliamentary Divorce for Ontario
Wednesday September 25Matthew Steilen, University of Buffalo Law SchoolInventing Parliament: The Formation of a Legislative Power in Medieval England, 1100-1350
Wednesday October 9Catherine Le Guerrier, Osgoode Hall Law SchoolCanadian Consumers and the State, 1953-1969
Wednesday October 23N/ANo Workshop. Many participants will be attending the American Society for Legal History Conference
Wednesday October 30Heidi Bohaker, University of Toronto'Lands...for a trifling sum': Settler Logic, Crown Rhetoric, and the Law of Alliance in Upper Canada's early Land Purchase Treaties, 1781-1790
Wednesday November 6N/A

No workshop. University of Toronto Reading Week

Wednesday November 13Preston Lim, University of TorontoThe Canadian New Deal Cases
Wednesday November 20James Barry, Osgoode Hall Law SchoolJohn Reeves as Legislative Drafter: The Police Bill of 1785
Wednesday December 4Nick Rogers, York UniversityThe Abduction of Clementina Clarke, 1791

Winter Term 2025

DatePresenterSubject
Wednesday January 8Michael Borsk, Queen’s UniversityTBA
Wednesday January 22Sascha Auerbach, University of NottinghamThe Vice of Regimen”: Slavery, Biopolitics, and the Origins of Public Health in the British Caribbean, 1768-1834
Wednesday February 5Patricia McMahon, Osgoode Hall Law SchoolStewart v Steele, 1835-1847: A Case study in support of the Fusion of Law and Equity
Wednesday February 19Taylor Starr, York UniversityNavigating Shadows of Brutality: A Historical Inquiry into the 1976 Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto Police Practices
Wednesday March 5David Berg, Ontario Court of JusticeThe Belcher Island Murder Trials, 1941
Wednesday March 19Maggie Ross, Queen’s UniversityToronto’s “Gilded Palaces of Sin”: Property, Prostitution Law, and the Toronto Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1860s-1890s
Wednesday April 2Zoe Savitsky, Osgoode Hall Law SchoolRegulating Lesbian Sexuality in Canada, 1969-1982