Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax by Philip Girard (review)

Despite its primary title, this book deals mainly with one lawyer, Beamish Murdoch (1800–1876). Following his career, however, does reveal much about the developing Nova Scotian legal profession up to Confederation and about provincial society more generally. Murdoch emerges as a likeable man, benevolent and principled, and as a good lawyer who was also an influential writer and politician. He supported Joseph Howe against the establishment in the famous libel trial of 1835. However, he later refused Howe’s offer of what would probably have been a safe seat in the Assembly, as he disapproved of party politics. Murdoch lived during a period of rapid expansion. Girard notes that only thirteen lawyers operated outside the capital in 1820. By 1830, that number had grown to forty-two, and ten years later, to seventy-five. Towns were growing and becoming more sophisticated, and a common legal culture was developing across the province. Examining Murdoch’s activities during the period of expansion gives a good sense of what lawyers actually did and how their actions affected other areas of society.

Especially in the early part of his career, many of Murdoch’s clients were artisans and small shopkeepers. Most of the work involved recovery of debt, presumably a consequence of an economy that functioned largely on credit. A variety of courts existed to settle disputes. As one might expect in a seafaring community, the Vice-Admiralty Court was busy with such issues as unpaid wages, breach of contract, and salvage. Murdoch’s fees were reasonable, so people of barely-middling incomes could afford his services. Later in his career, he dealt more with largescale property transfers, business advice, and insurance. This shift may reflect not only his more prosperous clientele but also the increasing complexity of commercial life. He became the recorder, or city lawyer, of Halifax from 1850 to 1860. While in this position, he draft ed the Charter and Ordinances of Halifax (1851), establishing its basic regulations in a much clearer and more succinct style than that of his predecessors.

Murdoch opposed Responsible Government, but Girard is at pains (the point is perhaps overemphasized) to show that he was not merely reactionary. Murdoch feared that the Provincial Assembly would have too much power—for example, over patronage—and he disliked party politics, preferring that decisions be made by independents. These issues are not entirely dead. But Girard’s judgments of what are now Murdoch’s best-known works are somewhat negative: Murdoch’s Epitome of Nova Scotian law (1832–33) is deemed well-written but backward-looking, and his History of Nova Scotia (1867) is, according to Girard, characterized by “circumspection and obliqueness” (p. 181). I find this opinion somewhat puzzling, as the History of Nova Scotia is, in my view, a fairly straightforward chronicle.

In the epilogue of his book, Girard deals with Murdoch’s controversial last years. The suggestion that Murdoch was obsessed with sex and alcohol, a suggestion made during prolonged litigation over Murdoch’s will, is intriguing but unconvincing. I calculate the amount of drink he was allegedly supplied with at nearly a bottle of whisky a day plus a lot of wine, an amount that seems implausible for a strong temperance advocate, in his mid-seventies, who could still write coherent letters.

The topic suggested by the book’s title is fully treated only in the conclusion, which reads more as an addendum. Here, Girard argues convincingly that Canadian lawyers were distinguished from British ones by the merger of solicitors and barristers, and from Americans by a self-regulated professional structure. He then distinguishes between the “classical” view of rights as prepolitical and inviolable, and the “modern” view, which conceives of rights within a social context and not as absolute. The distinction is clear though the terms are rather confusing, as the “classical” view, with its insistence on the rights of man, seemed alarmingly...