Book Review: Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History: Essays in Honour of G. Blaine Baker

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History: Essays in Honour of G. Blaine Baker. Edited by Ian C. Pilarczyk, Angela Fernandez & Brian Young. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. 532 p. Includes illustrations, appendix, bibliography, contributor biographies, and index. ISBN 978-0-2280-1206-1 (hardcover) $140.00; ISBN 978-0-2280-1207-8 (softcover) $39.95; ISBN 978-0-2280-1226-9 (ePUB) $111.99.

Reviewed by Katarina Daniels
Research Lawyer, Library Services Lead
Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP

Although Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History: Essays in Honour of G. Blaine Baker is catalogued under the subject heading “Festschriften,” editors Ian C. Pilarczyk and Angela Fernandez tell us it’s actually a gedenkschrift, as it was conceived of and published posthumously in honour of Professor Emeritus Blaine Baker, who passed away in July 2018. And how fitting that a book written in honour of a man like Professor Baker should not fit neatly into a predefined Library of Congress subject heading.

I should preface this review by mentioning that I did not know Professor Baker, despite our time at McGill overlapping slightly (he taught his last course at McGill in 2016, the year after I graduated, but was teaching in Toronto in 2014–15). I only came to know of Professor Baker after his death through Genevieve Westgate, the research assistant for the editors of this book, who spent months on the third floor of the Nahum Gelber Law Library combing through all the course packs and conducting a type of “archeology” of Professor Baker’s teachings—a research methodology Professor Baker would have approved of.

My knowledge of Professor Baker is based almost entirely on this book, although I have since had conversations with some of his former students and colleagues. This includes a couple of the book’s contributors, with whom I had the pleasure of interacting at Les bibliothèques des juristes | Law’s Libraries, a conference co-hosted by the Centre Paul-André Crépeau de droit privé et comparé and the Groupe de recherche sur les humanités juridiques. During her presentation, Kathy Fisher, a former student of Professor Baker, reflected on her collaboration with him, Brian Young, and Vince Masciotra on one of Professor Baker’s most important contributions, which is referenced several times in the book: a four-year project that involved scanning the entire Nahum Gelber Law Library law collection for books with Quebec ties published between 1760 and 1890. This presentation, along with my discussion with Fisher and others, helped complete this review.

The book opens with a foreword by the Honourable Nicholas Kasirer, a “sometime student and colleague of Professor Baker,” who discusses how working at McGill, and in Quebec, grounded Professor Baker’s work (p. xiii). He emphasizes this over Professor Baker’s outward ambivalence toward Montreal, a place where he worked for over 30 years without settling down. Professor Baker was known to be a regular commuter on the overnight train from Toronto, and to couch surf in Montreal.

The book comprises two sections. Part I focuses on Professor Baker’s life and work, with chapters written by each of the three co-editors, as well as one by Richard Janda, a long-time colleague of Professor Baker. It is prefaced by a poem, footnotes margins minutes, by Kathy Fisher. Fisher’s poem took two years to write as she, along with other contributors, sought to pay homage to a pillar of Canadian legal history, an educator revered by his students, all while not shying away from discussing his mental health struggles, including alcoholism and depression. In fact, the editors’ decision to reference “negative aspects” of Professor Baker’s personal and professional life led to the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History pulling their funding for the book. For the editors, including these aspects of his life was essential for their tribute to be “authentic.” This addition also reflects what Professor Baker, with Richard Janda, did on the collective work of Supreme Court Justice Gerald Le Dain (p. 38).

Part II, by contrast, is a series of essays that reflect some aspect of Professor Baker’s research or teaching in subject, style (legal archelogies and micro-stories, in particular), or time period (pre-Confederation). It contains ten chapters on a variety of topics, such as judicial biographies, colonial origins of the division of powers in the British North America Act, Canada’s first technology transfer office, and the history of the Legal Process class at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. An introductory page that describes the author’s relationship with Professor Baker accompanies each chapter. Prefacing Part II are lyrics to “Model of a Legal Academian,” which Professor Baker wrote (to the tune of “Model of a Modern Major-General” from The Pirates of Penzance) and performed at one of McGill Law’s famous Skit Nights circa 1990.

The book does a fantastic job of painting a picture of a person “with significant fragility” who was also an “absolutely remarkable” contributor, to use Janda’s words for Justice Le Dain, which Fernandez in turn uses to describe Professor Baker (p. 43). We see the impact Professor Baker had on his students and in the Canadian legal history space: his devotion and commitment to his students’ academic and professional growth, his understanding of and approach to the law, and his values that shaped his relationship with the law, all of which impacted his research and teaching, notably of administrative law and legal history. As Reiter says, Professor Baker “gave law a humanist dimension” (p. 381). We also see a true friend of the library, someone who lived among the archival and rare books, encouraged print-based research, and was a fervent user of the Index to Canadian Legal Literature. Through Janda’s piece, we learn of Professor Baker’s quiet contributions that forever changed the teaching of law at McGill University. Yet we also learn of Professor Baker’s mental health struggles, his reserved distance from even his closest confidants, and his unease in the academic scene among colleagues.

Reading this text elicited two strong feelings in me: first, a desire to meet Professor Baker, coupled with regret that we did not meet during his lifetime; and second, a sense of pride in my profession and in the importance of law libraries. The type of research Professor Baker and the contributors of his gedenkschrift conducted all depended on librarians advocating for the profession and the collections: from the maintenance of historical course packs and personal libraries of legal scholars to the preservation of court archives; from the development of rare book collections to ensuring funds to maintain the microfiche readers that allow researchers to access historical newspapers; and from digitization initiatives to the lobbying for qualified staff. As it is, gaps in historical artifacts often prevent researchers from drawing broader conclusions, as is seen in Pilarczyk’s chapter on sex crimes against the woman-child in early nineteenth-century Montreal. Our work as librarians is even more necessary when we consider that the “passage of time injects differing perspectives on the potential meanings of a case” (p. 148). This is most notable as society and academia become more diverse, as Fernandez and Backhouse both argue in their respective essays. As information stewards, it is up to us to preserve and provide access to the resources that legal historians depend on for their research and, in this way, help promote and support stronger and more representative historical legal research.

This book is an essential purchase for all academic libraries supporting law or history programs. I also highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in legal history, legal education, or biographies. A warning to the reader, however: between Professor Baker’s publications and those of the contributors, reading this book will certainly result in the lengthening of your reading list.