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In Memoriam
Graham Edwin Price, K.C. Calgary, Alberta April 13, 1947 – January 12, 2024 On January 12, 2024, Graham Price, founder and long-time President of the Legal Archives Society of Alberta (LASA), passed away in Calgary, Alberta. In addition to being an excellent...
Lawyers, Husband and Wife, Soldier and Widow: The Story of Frederick Stanley Albright and Evelyn Kelly Albright
Frederick Stanley Albright was born in Beamsville, Ontario, on March 23, 1883. After his childhood in rural Ontario, Frederick moved to Toronto where he attended Victoria College, University of Toronto, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political...
Remembering Alberta Lawyers: Arthur Gardner Lincoln
The life and career of Arthur Gardner Lincoln was unlike most other Alberta lawyers who fought in World War I. Following a long and onerous process to become a lawyer – interrupted by war and coupled with a fair bit of ambiguity – it seems that Lincoln never...
Alberta Lawyers Volunteered for King, Country, and Empire
On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria and heir to the multinational Hapsburg Empire was assassinated on the streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This event was the culmination of growing nationalistic anxieties across southern and...
Book Review — Backhouse, Constance. Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022.
Constance Backhouse, a prominent Canadian legal historian and scholar, delves into the role racism plays in the justice system in her latest book, Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case. RDS was the case of Rodney Smalls, a Canadian teenager...
Alberta Lawyers and World War I: William Robinson Howson
When Canada joined the British in fighting Germany in August of 1914, Albertans from all walks of life lined up to volunteer on behalf of King and Country. Lawyers, law students, and other members of the legal profession were no exception to this particular wave of...
Your Husband is Dead! The Story of Alberta Lawyer and Soldier, Major Stanley Livingstone Jones
“Your husband is dead. He died in this hospital at 4 p.m.” This was the first line of a telegram Alice B. Jones - Stanley Jones’s wife - received from fellow prisoner of war, Eugene P. Buonaparte, informing her of her husband’s death. The telegram went on to...
From the Archives
By Brenda McCafferty, MARM, Archivist A recent donation of Alberta law stamps from the late Honourable Syd E. Wood, K.C., harkens memories of the Wood family legal legacy in Edmonton, and highlights First and Second World War remembrances. Sydney Wood, Q.C....
An Evening with the Chief Justice
On May 4 and October 19, 2023, LASA hosted our Annual Historical Dinners in Calgary and Edmonton respectively. Both were firsts for the annual events since November 2019 in Edmonton, and January 2020 in Calgary. We were delighted to welcome the Honourable Ritu...
Book Review — Wright, Barry, Susan Binnie, and Eric Tucker, Eds. Canadian State Trials, Volume V: World War, Cold War, and Challenges to Sovereignty, 1939-1990. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.
A broad definition of a political state trial is one that involves the political interests of the government. Legal Historian F. Murray Greenwood had the idea for a series of books, inspired by an English history of state trials, that would trace political state...