Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History

Exploring Canadian legal history through the life and career of historian Blaine Baker.

Using the life and intellectual heritage of Blaine Baker, Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History is both biographical study and important exploration into contemporary issues in Canadian legal history, including legal education, gender and race, technology, nation building, criminal law, and much more.

As the leading legal historian of his generation in Canada and professor at McGill University for over three decades, Blaine Baker (1952–2018) was known for his unique personality, teaching style, intellectual cosmopolitanism, and deep commitment to the place of Canadian legal history in the curriculum of law faculties.

Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History examines important themes in Canadian legal history through the prism of Baker’s career. Essays discuss Baker’s own research, his influence within McGill’s law faculty, his complex personality, and the relationship between the private and the public in the life of a university intellectual at the turn of the twenty-first century. Inspired by topics Baker took up in his own writing, contributors use Baker’s broad interests in legal culture to reflect on fundamental themes across Canadian legal history, including legal education, gender and race, technology, nation building and national identity, criminal law and marginalized populations, and constitutionalism.

Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History offers a contemporary analysis of Canadian legal history and thoughtfully engages with what it means to honour one individual’s enduring legacy in the study of law.