In 1994, a white police officer arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke hold, and charged him with assault and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Corrine Sparks – Canada’s first Black female judge – remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal was appealed and ultimately upheld, but most of the white judges who reviewed the decision critiqued Sparks’s comments. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada fumbled over its first complaint of judicial racial bias. This is an enthralling account of the country’s most momentous race case.

Both lionized and vilified, Claire L'Heureux-Dube has shaped the Canadian legal landscape - and in particular its highest court. Only the second woman on the Supreme Court of Canada, L'Heureux-Dube anchored her approach to cases in their social, economic, and political context. This compelling biography takes a similar tack, tracing the experience of a francophone woman within the male-dominated Quebec legal profession - and within the primarily anglophone world of the Supreme Court. In the process, Constance Backhouse enhances our understanding of the Canadian judiciary, the creation of law, the Quebec socio-legal environment, and the nation's top court.

In 1994, a white police officer arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke-hold, and charged him with assault and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Corrine Sparks - Canada's first Black female judge - remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal was appealed and ultimately upheld, but most of the white judges who reviewed the decision critiqued Sparks's comments. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada fumbled over its first complaint of judicial racial bias. This is an enthralling account of the country's most momentous race case.

Historically Canadians have considered themselves to be more or less free of racial prejudice. Although this conception has been challenged in recent years, it has not been completely dispelled. In Colour-Coded, Constance Backhouse illustrates the tenacious hold that white supremacy had on our legal system in the first half of this century, and underscores the damaging legacy of inequality that continues today.

Backhouse presents detailed narratives of six court cases, each giving evidence of blatant racism created and enforced through law. The cases focus on Aboriginal, Inuit, Chinese-Canadian, and African-Canadian individuals, taking us from the criminal prosecution of traditional Aboriginal dance to the trial of members of the 'Ku Klux Klan of Kanada.' From thousands of possibilities, Backhouse has selected studies that constitute central moments in the legal history of race in Canada. Her selection also considers a wide range of legal forums, including administrative rulings by municipal councils, criminal trials before police magistrates, and criminal and civil cases heard by the highest courts in the provinces and by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The extensive and detailed documentation presented here leaves no doubt that the Canadian legal system played a dominant role in creating and preserving racial discrimination. A central message of this book is that racism is deeply embedded in Canadian history despite Canada's reputation as a raceless society.

Winner of the Joseph Brant Award, presented by the Ontario Historical Society

The collection represents a rich array of interdisciplinary expertise,with authors who are law professors, historians, sociologists andcriminologists. Their essays include studies into the lives of judgesand lawyers, rape victims, prostitutes, religious sect leaders, andcommon criminals. The geographic scope touches Canada, the UnitedStates and Australia. The essays explore how one individual, or smallself-identified groups, were able to make a difference in how law wasunderstood, applied, and interpreted. They also probe the degree towhich locale and location influenced legal culture history.