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.

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.