The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire

Abstract

Theavailabilityof the literature of the law, an aspect of legal culture rarely considered in twentieth century Canadian commentary on the ‘reception’ of imperial laws, must have had a great deal to do with the way that sources of law informed and reflected the developing jural values, doctrine, and methodology of the British North American provinces. Yet locally-prevalent versions of legal positivism, which find expression in formalistic, contemporary constitutional scholarship on transferral issues, have tended to suppress or render irrelevant inquiries into the way that such intellectual forces as law books actually affected the development of the legal culture of Upper Canada/Ontario.