My Life in the Law is a rich, personal reflection on Robert J. Sharpe’s long, varied, and influential career as a lawyer, scholar, and judge.After giving an account of his early life and education, Sharpe examines his time as a law student in the late 1960s, an era when great emphasis was put upon formalistic legal doctrine, heavily influenced by English law. As a legal academic in the 1970s up until the 1990s, Sharpe participated in Canadian law’s emergence from the shadow...

Good Judgment, based upon the author's experience as a lawyer, law professor, and judge, explores the role of the judge and the art of judging. Engaging with the American, English, and Commonwealth literature on the role of the judge in the common law tradition, Good Judgment addresses the following questions: What exactly do judges do? What is properly within their role and what falls outside? How do judges approach their decision-making task?In an attempt to exp...

When Brian Dickson was appointed in 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada was preoccupied with run-of-the-mill disputes. By the time he retired as Chief Justice of Canada in 1990, the Court had become a major national institution, very much in the public eye. The Court's decisions, reforming large areas of private and public law under the Charter of Rights, were the subject of intense public interest and concern.Brian Dickson played a leading role in this transformation. Engaging and i...

**A National Post Bestseller!How did Tom Thomson die in the summer of 1917?**Was landscape painter Tom Thomson shot by poachers, or by a German-American draft dodger? Did a blow from a canoe paddle knock him unconscious and into the water? Was he fatally injured in a drunken fight? Did he end his life out of fear of being forced to marry his pregnant girlfriend?Commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of the renowned Canadian landscape paint...

Few recent events in British Columbia have seized the public mind like the 2006 sinking of the BC Ferries passenger vessel Queen of the North. Across Canada, it was one of the top news stories of the year. In BC it has attained the status of nautical legend. Ten years later, questions are still being asked. How did a ship that sailed the same course thousands of times fall victim to such an inexplicable error? Was the bridge crew fooling around? Why doesn't anybody in the know com...

**#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The true story of one man so determined to take down two of the nation's largest corporations accused of killing children from water contamination that he risks losing everything."The legal thriller of the decade." —Cleveland Plain Dealer**Described as “a page-turner filled with greed, duplicity, heartache, and bare-knuckle legal brinksmanship" by The New York Times, A Civil Action

The 1920s were one of the wildest decades in Canada's history a time of frivolous fads shocking crimes and political and social changes that definitively yanked the country out of the 19th century and into the modern age. In Strange Days Ted Ferguson revisits dozens of stories that could only have happened in the '20s tales of serial killers athletes con men crackpots prime ministers bathing beauties and more all of them nearly too amazing to believe and too entertaining to be for...

A successful former defense attorney exposes the raw truth about the courtroom "game" and a career spent defending the guiltyAs an advocate for the accused in Newark, New Jersey, criminal lawyer Seymour Wishman defended a vast array of clients, from burglars and thieves to rapists and murderers. Many of them were poor and undereducated, and nearly all of them were guilty. But it was not Wishman's duty to pass moral judgment on those he represented. His job was to c...

Rare views of human lives in turmoil are revealed in several hundred trials conducted in 1890s Muskoka by Magistrate James Boyer of Bracebridge. The charges and evidence show how raw life really was in Canada's frontier towns, with cases ranging from nostalgic and humorous to pitiable and deeply disturbing.While dispensing speedy justice, Boyer, who was also town clerk and editor of the Northern Advocate, the first newspaper in Ontario's northern districts, kept a careful ...

Jean Chr̩tien's critics have said he was a man with no vision and a short attention span Рa small-town hick who stumbled his way to become Canada's 20th prime minister. Whatever credit the Chr̩tien government deserved was often given to Paul Martin, the heir apparent who was touted to be the brains behind the operation.But while Chretien was the subject of ridicule, he was quietly giving his competitors Рboth inside and outside of the Liberal party Рa master class in politics,...

Quiet Isaac Jelfs led many lives: a scapegoated law clerk in England; a soldier in the mad Crimean War; a lawyer on swirling Broadway Avenue in New York. His escape from each was wrapped in deep secrecy. He eventually reached Canada, in 1869, with a new wife and a changed name. In his new home — the remote wilderness of Muskoka — he crafted yet another persona for himself. In Another Country, Another Life, his great-grandson traces that long-hidden journey, exposing Isaac Jelfs' c...

The first full-scale biography in twenty-five years of one of the most important and distinguished justices to sit on the Supreme Court–a book that reveals Louis D. Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit.A huge and galvanizing biography, a revelation of one man’s effect on American society and jurisprudence, and the electrifying story of his time.