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“The Social Ecology of Canadian Tort Law, 1945-1995: Mentalité, Method, Interpretation”
Abstract
This paper concerns ongoing research in the social history of the Canadian tort law system in the period 1945-1995. It will amplify themes and methods introduced in “The Reinvention of Canadian Tort Law, 1945-1995: Jordan House as case study,” examining the historical genesis, pleading and adjudication of an innovative tort claim in Canada in the early 1970s. The paper explores the conceptual and methodological challenges facing social historians of tort law. Its particular focus is a hypothesized shift in self-conception and social outlook (“mentalité”) among Canadians in the 1960s, and its possible impact on the genesis, litigation, and adjudication of tort law in the period 1970-1995.
The speaker
Professor Kostal is a leading legal historian whose works include: Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020 winner of the John Phillip Reid Prize); A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (Oxford University Press, 1997)