Photo by Dewey Chang
Professor Jim Phillips has been elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History – the highest honour the Society confers – recognizing distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the discipline of legal history.
Phillips was recognized for his contributions to Canadian legal history, as a teacher, scholar, and editor-in-chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. A leading figure in the field of Canadian legal history, Phillips has made the history of law a dynamic tool for interrogating Canada’s past, present and national identity.
He and his co-authors were awarded W. Wesley Pue Book Prize from the Canadian Law and Society Association for A History of Law in Canada: Volume II: Law for the New Dominion, 1867-1914. Volume I, Beginnings to 1866, was published in 2018 and Volume III, The Twentieth Century, will appear in 2026. In 2013, Phillips was awarded the Attorney General of Ontario's Mundell Medal, honouring excellence in legal writing.
"Congratulations to Jim on this recognition from the American Society for Legal History," said Jutta Brunnée, Dean of the Faculty of Law, University Professor and James Marshall Tory Dean’s Chair. "His contributions to Canadian legal history scholarship extend far beyond our borders and it is wonderful to see his work recognized with this honour."
His election to Honorary Fellow was announced at the Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco on Oct. 26.
Citation of Professor James R. “Jim” Phillips as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History
October 26, 2024
The Society is pleased to welcome as Honorary Fellow James R. Phillips, known universally as “Jim,” Professor on the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Professor Phillips has shaped the field of Canadian legal history through his own scholarship and through the dozens of scholars whose books and monographs he has shepherded to publication.
Professor Phillips received his PhD in history from Dalhousie University in 1983 and earned an LLB, also from Dalhousie, four years later. He first taught as an assistant professor history at Dalhousie from 1983-1987, after which he served as law clerk to Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada. He joined the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto in 1988 and has remained there since. He is also cross-appointed to the Department of History and the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History since 2006. In 2013 the government of Ontario awarded him the David Walter Mundell Medal in recognition of his distinguished contributions to law and letters. He recently was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Across four co-authored books, eight co-edited collections of essays, and over sixty book chapters and journal articles, Professor Phillips has deepened our understanding of a wide range of topics–criminal law, private law and the economy, judicial reform, the development of judicial independence, state relations with indigenous peoples, marriage and gender, trusts, the legal profession, prisons, and more. His scholarship is marked by a belief in the value of linking local, community and even family events that ended up in the courts, both criminal and civil, to broader issues of legal and social policy. This belief animates his crowning accomplishment, the three-volume A History of Law in Canada, which he co-authored with Philip Girard and R. Blake Brown. The work is monumental in the breadth and depth of its coverage. No mere summary or synthesis of existing work, the volumes are full of new research and fresh insights on substantive law, legal institutions, legal actors, and legal culture and their relation to broader political, economic, social, cultural, and moral contexts across common law, civil law, and Indigenous law. Among other accomplishments, it addresses Indigeneity and Indigenous law, colonialism, race, gender and the legal experiences of various minorities within Canadian law with care and sensitivity.
As field-defining as Professor Phillips’s scholarship has been, he has also built the field by encouraging and supporting the work of others. As Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History since 2006, he has overseen the publication of over sixty books, monographs, and essay collections. In other words, he has had a nurturing and guiding hand in the creation of the core modern scholarship that has established the field of Canadian legal history, while also encouraging and furthering the careers of the scholars whose work he has championed.
Professor Phillips has also encouraged the work of other scholars through a forum he created that is, perhaps, without equal in its reach, duration, and influence–the Legal History Workshop that he has led biweekly for some thirty-five years to discuss work-in-progress by scholars young and old, from graduate students to senior scholars. The workshop community went international when the pandemic forced meetings onto Zoom, where it has remained, drawing in new audiences across Canada and beyond.
The scholars we elect as Honorary Fellows are distinguished not simply by scholarship that has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others, but also by their commitment to building their fields and helping other, younger, scholars stand on their shoulders and carry the work forward. Professor Phillips is widely known as a collaborative, kind, and helpful colleague to every scholar working in the field, wherever they may be and whatever their seniority. He has made the field of legal history in Canada stronger and been an exemplary mentor to generations of legal historians. The Committee believes that Professor Phillips amply merits election as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
