The Grand Experiment

The essays in this volume reflect the exciting new directions in which legal history in the settler colonies of the British Empire has developed. The contributors show how local life and culture in selected settlements influenced, and was influenced by, the ideology of the rule of law that accompanied the British colonial project. Exploring themes of legal translation, local understandings, judicial biography, and “law at the boundaries,” they examine the legal cultures of dominions in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to provide a contextual and comparative account of the “incomplete implementation of the British constitution” in these colonies.

Hamar Foster is a professor of law at the University of Victoria. Benjamin L. Berger an assistant professor of law at the University of Victoria. A.R. Buck is a professor of law and Co-Director of the Centre for Comparative Law, History and Governance at Macquarie University, Australia.

Contributors: Simon Bronitt, Lyndsay M. Campbell, Jeremy Finn, Philip Girard, Ian Holloway, Bruce Kercher, Greg Marquis, John P.S. McLaren, Stefan Petrow, Jim Phillips, Janna Promislow, Jonathan Swainger, David V. Williams, John Williams, Barry Wright, and Nancy E. Wright

Peter Karsten, author of Between Law and Custom: “High” and “Low” Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora, 1600-1900:

This collection of essays by Canada’s and Australasia’s most accomplished legal historians is a “must” for academic libraries and those who share these scholars’ interest in the legal culture of the British colonial world.