Lawyers’ Empire

This collection is a timely treasure. Wes Pue’s search for the shifting meanings of legal professionalism propelled him across centuries and continents, from Victorian England to Canada’s prairie west to colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. Legal culture – what laypeople thought of lawyers and what lawyers thought of themselves – forms the analytical bridge linking these varied periods and places. As the legal profession enters a time of turbulence and transformative change, there could be no better time to be reminded of how earlier crises shaped today’s professional landscape. Philip Girard, Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School

Never one to equivocate, Wes Pue opens this book with a flourish. The past, he insists, is a ‘foreign place that can never be known.’ Unmasking lawyers as ‘energetic purveyors of historical myth,’ Pue then turns his considerable talents toward the ‘pursuit of better myth.’ Read this and marvel at his insight, his painstaking research, and his incomparable wit. These essays, boldly ranging across Britain and its Empire, brilliantly substantiate Wes Pue’s ‘larger than life’ reputation as one of Canada’s most fascinating legal historians. Constance Backhouse, Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa

These innovative and richly detailed essays about history, law, and the legal profession present a significant contribution to common-law understandings of law’s travels across times and places and colonial regimes. Adopting simultaneously a local and transnational lens, Lawyers’ Empire reveals the role of the legal profession in the formation of national identities and cultural practices woven through with legal myths, competing narratives, and contradictory claims to authority. This is a ground-breaking volume, underscoring the colonial residues in all histories of the common law legal profession. Eve Darian-Smith, Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara

No one should be allowed to study, teach, practise, or write about Canadian law without first reading Lawyers’ Empire, Wes Pue’s fine collection of historical essays. His account of the antecedents, culture, education, governance, and political economy of the Canadian and English legal professions is deeply informed and astonishingly informative, broad in sweep and rich in detail, provocative and witty. Harry Arthurs, President Emeritus, University Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science, York University

This is a superb collection of essays from a scholar who eschews the obvious, yet attacks the crux of the issue without rubbing your nose in it. Nobody lays out for the reader such clarity of proffered understandings with such fascinating histories. There is a cinematic sense about Professor Pue’s approach. He begins with a close-up on the individual specific, then withdraws to global view, with a short flashback, before setting the story in full play. This releases us from ‘given’ theory such as the ‘sterile’ view of the history of legal education as a battle between the profession and the academy and enables a deeper, more nuanced understanding that also enlightens the problems of today. Avrom Sherr, Woolf Professor of Legal Education Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

For decades Wesley Pue has stood at the forefront of the world’s leading scholars on the politics of legal professions. This outstanding blending of his writings into a unified whole reveals at once the scope and imagination of his always fertile search for new and enlightening corners of lawyers’ activities at work and collectively. He moves seamlessly and with great intellectual dexterity across the centuries from the heart of the British Empire to its edges, from one colony or post-colony to another. He unearths long-forgotten archives and melds disparate materials into rich theoretical motifs. Lawyers’ Empire recasts our thinking about empire and the cultural politics of lawyers. Terence Halliday, Research Professor and Co-Director, Center on Law and Globalization, at the American Bar Foundation

Lawyers’ Empire is a phrase that perfectly captures the double meaning at the centre of this collection of Wesley Pue’s wide-ranging and provocative studies of lawyers and the legal profession. Pue’s lawyers look to place themselves and their profession at the apex of society – an empire defined by the rule of law. They simultaneously look to advance their national and imperial projects – an empire of liberal thought governed by lawyers. Drawing broad lessons from a variety of case studies, these essays are models of the historian’s craft. Jim Phillips, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and Editor-in-Chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History

The many admirers of Wes Pue’s distinctive approach to the history of the legal profession will not be disappointed by this latest collection of his work, the culmination of decades of pioneering research on lawyers, their corporate culture, and their socio-political engagements. In a series of perceptive microstudies traversing Imperial Britain and the British Empire, informed by wide-ranging theoretical and multi-disciplinary perspectives, Pue unravels the complexities and contradictions of professional rhetoric and the lived reality of legal lives. Wilfrid Prest, Professor Emeritus of History and of Law at the University of Adelaide