This volume in the Osgoode Society's distinguished series on the history of Canadian law is a tribute to Professor R.C.B. Risk, one of the pioneers of Canadian legal history and for many years regarded as its foremost authority. The fifteen original essays are by notable scholars, some of whom were students of Professor Risk, and represent some of the best and most original work in the area of Canadian legal history. They cover a number of important topics that range from the form of the criminal trial in the eighteenth century, to debates over the meaning of property in the nineteenth, and to lawyer/poet Tom MacInnes's views on the law of aboriginal title in the twentieth century.

G. Blaine Baker is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Law at McGill University.

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Jim Phillips is Professor of Law, History and Criminology at the University of Toronto, and editor-in-chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. He has co-edited four volumes of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History’s Essays in the History of Canadian Law and, with Philip Girard, a volume on the history of Canada’s oldest surviving superior common law court, The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia 1754-2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle (Osgoode Society, 2004). He has published over fifty articles and book chapters on British imperial history and 18th-century India, on property and charities law, US legal history, and, principally, Canadian legal history. He is also the author, with Rosemary Gartner, of Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (University of British Columbia Press, 2003).

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