This volume is the second in the Essays in the History of Canadian Law series, designed to illustrate the wide possibilities for research and writing in Canadian legal history. In combination, these volumes reflect the wide-ranging scope of legal history as an intellectual discipline andencourage others to pursue important avenues of inquiry on all aspects of our legal past.

Topics include the role of civil courts in Upper Canada; legal education; political corruption; nineteenth-century Canadian rape law; the Toronto Police Court; the Kamloops outlaws and commissions of assize in nineteenth-century British Columbia; private rights and public purposes in Ontario waterways; the origins of workers' compensation in Ontario; and the evolution of the Ontario courts. Contributors include Brendan O'Brien, Peter N. Oliver, William N.T. Wylie, G. Blaine Baker, Paul Romney, Constance B. Backhouse, Paul Craven, Hamar Foster, Jamie Bendickson, R.C.B. Risk, and Margaret A. Banks.

David Flaherty is a specialist in the management of privacy and information policy issues. He recently completed a six-year, non-renewable term as the first Information and Privacy Commissioner for the Province of British Columbia. From 1972 until 1993 he was professor of history and law at the University of Western Ontario, from which he is now a professor emeritus. In 1992ȁ3;93 he was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and a Canada-US. Fulbright Scholar in Law. He is currently an Adjunct professor in political science at the University of Victoria. Dr. Flaherty has written extensively on privacy and information policy and has testified on privacy issues in both the US Congress and the Parliament of Canada. In the fall of 1999 he served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Minister of Industry Canada in support of Bill C-6, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

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'Both the Osgoode Society and Professor Flaherty are to be commended for their parts in fostering and publishing these works of significant quality.'

The Canadian Bar Review

'This well researched and lucidly written collection is placed extremely well in the social, economic and political history of the subject.'

The International and Comparative Law Quarterly

'From almost every standpoint it is an exceptional accomplishment. The mature scholarship in this volume testifies again to the careful and insistent hand of editor Flaherty.'

Ontario History