Dalhousie Law Professors Receive Major SSHRC Research Awards

Dalhousie Law Professors Receive Major SSHRC Research Awards

Dalhousie Law Professors have been awarded over $330,000 in Social Sciences Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants to pursue research in legal history, corporate law, and extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Professor Philip Girard has received a grant of $137,000 to fund a major study of Canadian legal history. Co-investigators are Prof. Jim Phillips of the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and Prof. Blake Brown of the Department of History, St. Mary’s University.

The goal of the project is to produce a one-volume study of the history of law in Canada from the time of European contact to the end of the 20^th century. It will synthesize and build on existing work but will also undertake new research to fill the significant gaps in current scholarship. Canadian legal historians have produced an impressive body of scholarship to date but it has been rich in micro-studies and thin on overarching themes and connections across time and space. The study will stress the polyjurality of Canadian law as it explores the continuing interaction of Aboriginal, French and British legal traditions in the development of Canadian law, as well as the growing influence of international law on domestic law. While this will be a study of formal law, it will keep in view the influence of other forms of normativity such as religion, workplace ordering, and the like, by invoking the concept of legal culture. Legal culture assists in bridging the gap between the enunciation of formal law and its reception, enforcement, contestation, and impact on the population at large.

This will be the first comprehensive account of the development of Canadian law over the longue durée. It will appeal to those interested in law, history, socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, criminology, legal theory, political science, and Canadian studies.

The award will fund travel by the investigators to provincial and national archives, research assistance, and work by graduate students.

A Standard Research Grant of $117,163 for the 2008-10 academic years was awarded to Professor Mohamed Khimji, as Principal Investigator, and Professor Chris Nicholls of the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario, as Co-investigator, for their study entitled “Separate Legal Personality and Limited Liability in Canadian Corporate Law: An Empirical and Economic Analysis”.

The study will analyze empirically decisions in which Canadian courts have been asked to disregard the separate legal personality of corporations and/or the limited liability of shareholders.

	Professors Hugh Kindred, Steve Coughlan and Rob Currie have received a grant of over $77,000. The grant will fund a three-year research project entitled “Law Beyond Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction in an Age of Globalization”, which will be carried out with co-recipient (and former Dalhousie Law professor) Teresa Scassa of the University of Ottawa.
	The extent to which states can exercise jurisdiction over matters that exist or take place outside their borders is increasingly dynamic and controversial under international law. The goal of the project is to critically examine the use of extraterritorial jurisdiction by states and formulate an analytical framework to help Canadian law- and policy-makers in making principled decisions on the issue.
	The project builds on earlier work by the four professors. In 2006 they were commissioned by the Law Commission of Canada to do an initial study on extraterritorial jurisdiction. The resulting article “Global Reach, Local Grasp: Constructing Extraterritorial Jurisdiction in the Age of Globalization,” which was published in the Canadian Journal of Law & Technology, was cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Hape, a major decision on the exertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction in criminal investigations. They are looking forward to continuing this interesting and timely work.