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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Lawyers’ Empire

Legal Professions and Cultural Authority, 1780-1950

Approaching the legal profession through the lens of cultural history, Wes Pue explores the social roles that lawyers imagined for themselves in England and its empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on a moment when lawyers sought to reshape their profession while at the same time imagining they were shaping nation and empire in the process. As an exploration of the relationship between legal professionals and liberalism, this book draws attention to recurrent tensions that have arisen as lawyers sought to assure their own economic well-being while simultaneously advancing the causes of liberty, cultural authority, stability, and continuity.

516 pages | © 2016

Law and Society


Table of Contents

Foreword / David Sugarman

Part 1: History in Professional Apologetics

1 The Use of History in the Development of Lawyers’ Mythologies

2 How “French” Was the English Bar? Barristers and Political Liberalism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

3 Law and Colony: Making the Canadian Legal Profession

Part 2: Shaping Minds and Souls: Legal Education

4 Professional Legal Education at Queen’s College, Birmingham, in the 1850s

5 Common Law Legal Education in the Dominion of Canada’s Moral Project

6 British Empire Perspectives on the Case Method of Legal Education: Canada, 1885-1931

Part 3: Ethics, Regulation, and the Business of Law

7 Free Trade in Law: English Barristers, County Courts, and Provincial Practice in the 1850s

8 The End of Free Trade in Law: Discipline at the Inns in the 1860s

9 Regulating Lawyers’ Ethics in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada

Part 4: Challenging the Status Quo – Communists and Liberals

10 Gordon Martin, British Columbia Communist, 1948

11 Liberal Entrepreneurship Thwarted: Charles Rann Kennedy and the Foundations of England’s Modern Bar

Part 5: Dominion and Colonial Lawyering

12 Christ, Manhood, and Empire: The Case Method of Legal Education in Canada, 1885-1931

13 Lawyers’ Professionalism, Colonialism, State Formation, and National Life in Nigeria, 1900-60: “The Fighting Brigade of the People” / Co-authored with Chidi Oguamanam

Index

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