Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791-1849 (review)

Toronto has attracted the lion's share of research in English-speaking Canadian legal and social history. Murray's full-length study of crime in one of the earliest judicial districts of the province's colonial history (Upper Canada) pulls together all the previous specialist literature in books and journals, supplemented by research in the original legal records in Toronto and Ottawa. The work is organized in three sections—justice, morality, and crime—in which the general themes are well integrated into the text.

The general purpose of the book is to test the paradigm of Upper Canadian legal history as "shot through with corruption and partiality" (6). The major questions asked are, Was its history similar or opposite to that of its first lieutenant governor John Graves Simcoe, who believed that it had a "pure administration of justice" that replicated English society and institutions based on Christian morality (3)? Were its courts battlegrounds for war in the 1830s and 1840s, as Fraser has argued? Was its justice fair and humane, as police magistrate Colonel George Denison maintained in 1904, or repressive, as Wright and Romney subsequently argued?¹ Murray's conclusion occupies the middle ground: The corruption was not widespread; justice was uniform at assizes, but not at quarter sessions; the hybrid social structure that had developed by the 1840s enabled communities to be more assertive in the protection of individual rights; and the reforms of that decade resolved many earlier problems.

The book's results are mixed. As a case study of a judicial district, it is excellent. The evidence is clearly laid out and cogently written, the annotation excellent, and the tables and index usefully compiled and presented. As a comparative study, however, it has shortcomings. The author is not fully cognizant of the extent to which Upper Canada did not replicate English legal institutions, as Simcoe alleged. Regarding the Canadian governors' attempt to avoid the problems that the English criminal justice system had developed in the United States, Murray makes some useful points (176–181, 186–194, 210–216), but offers no overall analysis. About other Canadian jurisdictions in the same period, such as the Maritimes and Quebec, he is silent. Finally, he makes scant reference to the other Upper Canadian jurisdictions of the Gore, Home, and Midland. This lapse is particularly unfortunate since contemporary leaders measured their plans, tasks, and results in terms of the adjoining districts and American states within a British colonial and North American context.