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Book Review – McLaren, John. Dewigged, Bothered, & Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800-1900. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2011.
In history, context is everything. While detailing isolated incidents may be of historical interest, a comparative analysis can bring the richer complexity of a period to life. John McLaren achieves this in his 2011 book on judicial discipline in the British...
Book Review — Walker, Barrington, ed. The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
February is Black History month in Canada. It is a time when, across the country, people, organizations, and institutions recognize and celebrate the achievements of African Canadians. Canada’s history is rife with stories of the many contributions that African...
Book Review — Canada’s Legal Pasts: Looking Forward, Looking Back.
Campbell, Lyndsay, Ted McCoy, and Mélanie Méthot, eds. Canada’s Legal Pasts: Looking Forward, Looking Back. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2020. In 1973, Professor of Law, R.C.B. Risk, presented “A Prospectus for Canadian Legal History” at Dalhousie Law...
The 1932 Corona Hotel Fire
Legal history blog posts from LASA Archivist, Brenda McCafferty… The 1932 Corona Hotel Fire Origins of a Jasper Avenue Edmonton Landmark and the Northwestern Utilities Case: Recently, a Twitter post suggested Edmonton’s light rail transit (LRT) station,...
The 1918 Spanish Flu
Legal history blog posts from LASA Archivist, Brenda McCafferty… (on lockdown, working from home) Archival records at LASA related to the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: It may come as no surprise, that a startling number of members of the legal profession in Alberta,...
Calgary Bar Association to Fund LASA Project
On behalf of the Legal Archives Society of Alberta, I would like to thank the Calgary Bar Association for funding the completion of a publication using LASA's vast collection of Oral History interviews. The edited collection of stories from LASA’s Oral History...
Book Review: McLachlin, Beverley. Truth Be Told: My Journey Through Life and the Law. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.
McLachlin, Beverley. Truth Be Told: My Journey Through Life and the Law. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Throughout her life, Beverley McLachlin has played many roles: daughter, sister, devoted mother and wife, student, lawyer, academic, judge and finally...
75th Anniversary of D-Day
On June 6, 1944, men from Allied nations fighting Nazi tyranny made a harrowing trip across the English Channel to the beaches of Normandy. Leonard Brockington, a Calgary lawyer, was reporting for CBC Radio about the invasion of Europe from the Canadian Destroyer...
Annual General Meeting 2019
Please join the Legal Archives Society of Alberta in welcoming Graham Price, Q.C., LASA’s founding President, for a retrospective discussion on the establishment of the Legal Archives. With nearly 30 years of promoting and preserving Alberta’s legal heritage, LASA...
Archival Collection: the Hon. John H. MacKenzie and Duncan L. McKillop, Q.C. Fonds
On April 9, 1985, James Keegstra, a high school Social Studies teacher from Eckville, Alberta, was put on trial for willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group, the Jewish people. Between September 1978 and December 1982, Keegstra communicated...