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Themes and Variations in Early Canadian Legal Culture: Beamish Murdoch and his Epitome of the Laws of Nova-Scotia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Philip Girard
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Extract

Beamish Murdoch (1800–76) was a young man when the first of the four volumes of his Epitome of the Laws of Nova-Scotia rolled off Joseph Howe's press at Halifax in the spring of 1832. He was an old man when the first installment of his three-volume History of Nova-Scotia, or Acadie appeared under James Barnes's imprint in the spring of 1865. These two works have received surprisingly disparate attention in the century since Murdoch's death. Today it is Murdoch the historian who is well known: No treatment of nineteenth-century Canadian historiography would omit reference to his History. Murdoch's contributions to literary and political life, as editor of the Acadian Magazine and member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1826 to 1830, have also attracted attention. Murdoch the lawyer and legal treatise-writer, by contrast, is virtually unknown in both professional and legal academic circles, even in his home province. Until recently the Epitome has attracted virtually no scholarly attention of any kind.

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Articles
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Law and History Review , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Spring 1993 , pp. 101 - 144
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1993

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References

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3. D. C. Harvey wrote a brief centenary notice of the work: “Nova Scotia's Black-stone” Canadian Bar Review 11 (1933): 339. Very recently Canadian legal historians have begun to rely on the Epitome for accounts of particular areas of the law during the first third of the nineteenth century: see Brown, Desmond, The Genesis of the Criminal Code of 1892 (Toronto, 1989).Google Scholar In part this lack of interest lay in the inaccessibility of the Epitome: prior to the publication of a 1971 reprint edition by William Gaunt & Sons of Holmes Beach, Florida, the only law faculties in Canada to possess a copy were those at Dalhousie and the University of New Brunswick. McGill University possessed a copy, which was housed in the Lande Canadiana Collection rather than in the law library. Today most law libraries in Canada have a copy of the reprint edition. On the tendency of Canadian law librarians to collect English rather than Canadian rare books, see Baker, G. Blaine, “The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire,” Law and History Review 5 (1985): 286 n. 211.Google Scholar

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10. Journals and Proceedings of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia, 20 March 1846.

11. Not until 1850 did Murdoch finally settle a £460 note with Howe relating to the publication of the Epitome. Beck, J. Murray, Joseph Howe (Kingston and Montreal, 1982), 1:100.Google Scholar

12. Murdoch, Beamish, Epitome of the Laws of Nova Scotia, 4 vols. (Halifax, 1832), 1:v.Google Scholar

13. Ibid. 1:46–48

14. Swift, Zephaniah, A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut, 2 vols. (1795 – 96, repr. New York, 1972).Google Scholar Both Murdoch and Swift have separate chapters on “Crimes” and “Equity,” which Kent lacks.

15. Taylor, Promoters, Patriots and Partisans, 42–43.

16. On this genre, see generally Simpson, A. W. B., “The Rise and Fall of the Legal Treatise: Legal Principles and the Forms of Legal Literature,” University of Chicago Law Review 48 (1981): 632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Murdoch, Epitome 1:3

18. Ibid. 1:2

19. I hope to explore in a subsequent article the extent to which Murdoch drew inspiration from the tradition of civic humanism initially explored by Pocock, J. G. A. in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar and elaborated under the name of republicanism by a whole generation of American historians concerned with the origins of the American revolution. Certainly the celebration of civic virtue over commerce, a major theme in the republican tradition, is a constant element in the Epitome and in Murdoch's own life. See below, text accompanying notes 78–79.

20. The office of justice of the peace was not totally unremunerative, as fees could be charged for various services. The only salaried magistrate in Nova Scotia until just prior to Confederation presided over the Halifax Police Court, created in 1815: see Girard, Philip, “The Rise and Fall of Urban Justice in Halifax, 1815–1886,” Nova Scotia Historical Review 8(2) (1988): 57.Google Scholar

21. Murdoch, Epitome 1:58

22. Ibid. 1:108, 116–17, 2:79–80. On the question of quit-rents, see Beck, J. Murray, Politics of Nova Scotia, (Tantallon, N.S., 1985), 1:102–3, 107–8.Google Scholar

23. Murdoch, Epitome 2:79–80.

24. Ibid. 4:181.

25. Ibid. 2:96, 177.

26. Kent, James, Commentaries on American Law, 2d ed., 4 vols. (New York, 1832), 1:464.Google Scholar Murdoch would have used the first edition of 1826–30, but I have had access to the second edition only.

27. Ibid. 1:450.

28. Statutes of Nova Scotia 1789, c. 1. Later developments to 1830 are discussed in Garner, John, The Franchise and Politics in British North America 1755–1867 (Toronto, 1969), 21–25.Google Scholar

29. Garner, Franchise and Politics, 25. Free blacks were not formally excluded from the franchise, but it is unclear whether they voted in practice if otherwise eligible. In New Brunswick, their votes were not accepted, at least in the eighteenth century: Bell, D. G., “Slavery and the Judges of Loyalist New Brunswick,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 31 (1982): 9, 15.Google Scholar

30. Murdoch, Epitome 1:68.

31. Howe, Joseph, Western and Eastern Rambles: Travel Sketches of Nova Scotia, ed. Parks, M. G. (Toronto, 1973).Google Scholar

32. Greg Marquis, “In Defence of Liberty. Seventeenth-Century England and Nineteenth-Century Maritime Political Culture” (unpublished ms. 1988), 13. I am grateful to Dr. Marquis for allowing me to refer to his manuscript.

33. Murdoch, Epitome 1:33.

34. Ibid. 1:35–36.

35. Ibid. 1:34.

36. Murdoch's views were echoed in the most important case on reception to bedecided by Nova Scotia courts in the colonial period: Uniacke v. Dickson (1848), 2 Nova Scotia Reports 286, which was prosecuted for the Crown by the son of Murdoch's patron. Chief Justice Brenton Halliburton decided that Tudor statutes imposing a Crown lien upon the lands of customs officers in cases of defalcation could not be considered in force in Nova Scotia in the absence of reenactment by the local legislature. On reception generally, see Barnes, T. G., “‘As Near as May be Agreeable to the Laws of this Kingdom’: Legal Birthright and Legal Baggage at Chebucto, 1749,” in Law in a Colonial Society: The Nova Scotia Experience, ed. Waite, P. B. et al. (Toronto, 1984)Google Scholar; Cahill, J., “‘How Far English Laws are in Force Here’: Nova Scotia's First Century of Reception Law Jurisprudence,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal (forthcoming, 1993).Google Scholar

37. Murdoch, Epitome 1:35.

38. Ibid. 1:43.

39. “Legal Reform,” American Jurist and Law Magazine 9 (1833): 289.

40. Murdoch, Epitome 1:35.

41. Ibid. 1:23. On divorce generally, see Maynard, Kimberley Smith, “Divorce in Nova Scotia, 1750–1890,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. III, Nova Scotia, ed. Girard, P. and Phillips, J. (Toronto, 1990).Google Scholar

42. Murdoch, Epitome 1:36.

43. Ibid. 1:59.

44. Cited in Byrne, Cyril, “The Maritime Visits of Joseph Octave Plessis, Bishop of Quebec,” Nova Scotia Historical Society Collections 39 (1977): 23, 38.Google Scholar

45. Boorstin, Daniel, The Mysterious Science of the Law… (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), chap. 4.Google Scholar

46. Keefer, Janice Kulyk, Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction (Toronto, 1987), 66–67.Google Scholar

47. The Acadian Magazine (1826), quoted in Pacey, Elizabeth, Georgian Halifax (Hantsport, N.S., 1987), 43Google Scholar (“the best use of a Palladian compositional formula found in Canada”).

48. His aim seemed to be misunderstood by a Saint John lawyer, who complained that the work had “an air of extemporaneous speech”; its informal style he regarded as a drawback rather than an asset: Halifax Monthly Magazine (July 1832), 1 (reproducing a review in the Saint John Courier). An emphasis on plain speaking and informality was the stylistic hallmark of the literature of the period, as in “The Club” papers, the work of Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Thomas McCulloch's The tetters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (1821–22, repr. Halifax, 1860).

49. See, e.g., Halifax Monthly Magazine (March 1831), 397.

50. Cuthbertson, Brian, The Loyalist Governor: A Biography of Sir John Wentworth (Halifax, 1983).Google Scholar

51. Murdoch, Epitome 1:35.

52. To be fair, Murdoch does acknowledge this derivation at one point. Ibid. 2:182.

53. American Jurist and Law Magazine 8 (1832): 203, 204. On Hoffman, see below, note 107.

54. See, e.g., the American Jurist and Law Magazine, 1829–43.

55. On both trends, see Glenn, “Persuasive Authority,” 35.

56. Contrast the keen interest of American legal periodicals (for example, American Jurist and Law Magazine, 1829–43) in continental developments. It has been argued, however, that the English judiciary remained receptive to continental doctrines until rather later in the nineteenth century: Simpson, A. W. B., “Innovation in Nineteenth-Century Contract Law,” Law Quarterly Review 91 (1975): 247.Google Scholar

57. Murdoch refers to this work as Browne's “Civil and Admiralty Law.” A second London edition appeared in 1802, and the first American edition was published in 1840.

58. Murdoch, Epitome 1:42.

59. On Haliburton's environmentalism in his Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia, see Taylor, Promoters, Patriots and Partisans, 49.

60. Beamish Murdoch to H. J. Morgan, Sept. 28, 1865, H. J. Morgan Papers, National Archives of Canada, MG 29D 61, vol. 47.

61. For Murdoch's private views on the Acadian question, see Stewart, Alice R. et al., “A Nova Scotia-Maine Historical Correspondence, 1869,” Acadiensis 14(2) (1985): 108.Google Scholar

62. On pre-1749 attempts by the British administration to come to terms with Acadian civil law, see Thomas G. Barnes, “‘The Dayly Cry for Justice’: The Juridical Failure of the Annapolis Royal Regime, 1713–1749,” in Girard and Phillips, Nova Scotia Essays.

63. An example of his campaign literature from the election of October 1840 survives: “A Messieurs les Électeurs Francais Acadiens du comté d'Halifax, demeurants en Chez-etcook,” Library of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Akins Collection.

64. Glenn, “Persuasive Authority.”

65. Kent, Commentaries 1:7.

66. Ibid. 1:548.

67. Murdoch, Epitome 1:42.

68. Ibid. 1:43.

69. See generally Bell, “Slavery and the Judges,” 15–17.

70. Murdoch, , History of Nova-Scotia, or Acadie, 3 vols. (Halifax, 1865), 3:271.Google Scholar

71. Statutes of Nova Scotia 1834, c. 68.

72. Kent, Commentaries 2:268. Murdoch's grandmother had a black servant woman while he lived in her household, but his attitude toward blacks in general is unknown.

73. Murdoch, Epitome 1:65.

74. Ibid. 1:182.

75. MacNutt, W. S., The Atlantic Provinces: The Emergence of Colonial Society, 1712–1857 (Toronto, 1965), 164–65.Google ScholarBuggey, Susan, “Churchmen and Dissenters: Religious Toleration in Nova Scotia 1758–1835,” (M.A. thesis, Dalhousie University, 1981), 10–14, 112–31.Google Scholar

76. The shift in American thought is well illustrated by comparing the mistrust of judicial review voiced by statesmen of the early republic, such as James Madison, with Kent's opinions. On Madison's thought, see Nedelsky, Jennifer, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (Chicago and London, 1990).Google Scholar

77. Raack, David W., “‘To Preserve the Best Fruits’: The Legal Thought of Chancellor James Kent,” American Journal of Legal History 33 (1989): 320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78. Kent, Commentaries 2:318.

79. Murdoch, Epitome 2:69.

80. Ibid. 2:57–58. In fact, the Mi'kmaq were a well-organized, highly developed society, without whose assistance the French could never have established a presence in Acadia. Disastrous population decline after European contact meant that Nova Scotia's aboriginal population numbered only a few thousand by Murdoch's time, either contained on reserves or relegated to the remotest areas of the province. Murdoch's views seem to have changed considerably over time, as in his History he states that the Mi'kmaq “had long been a civilized and thinking race of people.” See Clarke, “Beamish Murdoch,” 98–99.

81. Stewart, “Historical Correspondence.”

82. Taylor, Promoters, Patriots and Partisans, 185.

83. Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG3, vol. 1836A.

84. Kent, Commentaries 2:319.

85. For legislation preventing the “forestalling, regrating and monopolizing of the market,” see Statutes of Nova Scotia 1766, c.6 (“victuals”); ibid. 1778, c.5; and ibid. 1798, c.4 (cord wood).

86. Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheaton 518 (1819). The literature on this seminal case is voluminous; see Stites, Francis N., Private Interest and Public Gain: The Dartmouth College Case (Amherst, Mass. 1972)Google Scholar; for a recent treatment Newmyer, R. Kent, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill and London; 1985), 129–37.Google Scholar

87. Pryke, K., “Beamish Murdoch,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1972), 10:539Google Scholar; Harvey, “Nova Scotia's Blackstone.”

88. Joseph Howe reported in the Novascotian, May 3, 1832 that volume one “has been before the public about a week, and has, we believe, been received in a manner highly flattering to its author,” but as the publisher of the Epitome and close friend of Murdoch, his testimony is hardly objective. Howe published extracts from each of the volumes as they appeared in the Novascotian (see October 31, 1832, May 22, 1833, July 31, 1833), but I have been unable to find any review of it in that newspaper. A complete search is impossible, however, as none of the newspapers of the period survive in complete runs. The Halifax Monthly Magazine (July, 1832) provided no review of its own, preferring to reprint a review from the Saint John Courier. The Colonial Patriot's editor noticed the book on May 5, 1832, had “not had time to read a word of it,” promised to provide extracts in a subsequent issue and never did so. Marshall damns the Epitome with faint praise in the introduction to his Justice of the Peace.

89. Murdoch had advertised for subscribers in the Novascotian, Feb. 24, 1832, but the response could not have been great since the Epitome was published without a subscription list; the prominent inclusion of such a list was de rigeur in period works that had used the subscription device. Daniel Dickson, author of the Guide to Town Officers, had advertised in the Pietou Bee, Sept. 7, 1836 for subscribers for “An Analysis of the Criminal and Penal Laws of Nova-Scotia,” but faced with a lack of response he was less sanguine than Murdoch: no such work ever appeared. He may also have decided that Marshall's work would be sufficient.

90. See above, note 11.

91. Each volume was advertised at 6s. 6d. “in boards” or 8s. in half-calf. When Marshall's Justice of the Peace was published under the auspices of the legislature in 1837, it sold for 12s. and 15s. respectively, and the province made a slight profit after selling 420 of the 500 copies printed. The remaining copies were distributed gratis to various officials but there is no reason to think that they would not have been sold if offered for sale; had they been, the return to the province on the venture would have been in the order of sixteen percent.

92. May 5, 1832, 71c.

93. Beck, Joseph Howe 1:98–100.

94. Another piece of evidence points in this direction. I have examined about fifty extant copies of the Epitome in various North American libraries and bookstores, and eight of these bear no sign of ever being owned by anyone. They are in boards, bear no provenance nor marking of any kind, and the pages are uncut in several cases.

95. Alexander Stewart to James Kent, Sept. 27, 1847, Kent Papers, vol. 11, Library of Congress, cited in Horton, John Theodore, James Kent: A Study in Conservatism, 1763–1847 (New York, 1969), 299.Google Scholar

96. Catalogue of Books, in the Law Library at Halifax, Michaelmas Term, 1835 (Halifax, 1835); Public Archives of Nova Scotia, V/F vol. 12, no. 15; Catalogue of the books in the Legislative Library of Nova Scotia, 1876 (Halifax, 1876); compare Catalogue of the books in the Legislative Library of Nova Scotia: authors, titles, and subjects (Halifax, 1890), which does list a copy of the Epitome, undoubtedly acquired by J. T. Bulmer, Nova Scotia's first legislative librarian 1879–82.

97. A copy of the Epitome in the rare books collection of the Dalhousie Law Library bears on the flyleaf the inscription “Law Library Dec. 1863” with the Barristers' Society stamp. Could it be that the lecture on the “Origins and Sources of the Law of Nova Scotia,” given by Murdoch on Aug. 29, 1863, at the request of the Law Students Society, finally embarrassed someone into acquiring a copy of the work for the Barristers' Library? The essay is reproduced as an appendix to Waite, P. B. et al., eds. Law in a Colonial Society: The Nova Scotia Experience (Toronto, 1984).Google Scholar

98. Murdoch, Epitome 1:13.

99. Crowe's copies of Kent and Murdoch are held by the Dalhousie Law Library. His copy of the Epitome was used to make microfilm copies held by both Harvard University and the University of Alberta. Walter Crowe LL.B, K.C. 1861–1934 was a member of the second graduating class of the Dalhousie Law School (1886). He was appointed a county court judge in 1925 and served as a member of the Historic Sites Board of Canada, in which capacity he was much involved in the work leading to the restoration of Louisbourg: see the obituary in Halifax Chronicle, Nov. 27, 1934.

100. Power's and Kaulbach's inscribed copies of Kent and Murdoch are held by the Dalhousie Law Library, except for Power's copy of Murdoch, which is held by Special Collections at Dalhousie's Killam Library.

101. For a similar pattern with regard to the treatment of Quebec's Civil Code of 1866, see Baudouin, J.-L., “Le Code civil québécois, crise de croissance ou crise de vieillesse?” Canadian Bar Review 44 (1965): 391.Google Scholar

102. A Catalogue of Books belonging to the Law Society of New Brunswick (Fredericton, 18 34); A Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Legislative Assembly of Canada (Montreal, 1846); Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Provincial Legislature, Upper Canada 1837 (n.d., n.p.); Catalogue of Books in the Library of Parliament (Quebec, 1852) (showing vol. 1 only, misclassified under “Provincial Journals and Laws”); Report of the Librarian of the Legislative Assembly in the Session of 1851: with a catalogue of books in the Parliamentary Library (Toronto, 1851); Catalogue of the library of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (Quebec, 1845, 1864); Catalogue of the Free Public Library of the City of St. John, N.B. (Saint John, 1892).

103. The catalogue of Halifax bookseller C. H. Belcher contains a long list of Englis texts in 1837, but no American ones.

104. McGee, Thomas D'Arcy, “Protection for Canadian Literature” (1858), in The Search for English-Canadian Literature, ed. Ballstadt, Carl (Toronto, 1975).Google Scholar

105. Bloomfield, Maxwell, “David Hoffman and the Shaping of a Republican Legal Culture” Maryland Law Review 38 (1979): 673.Google Scholar Hoffman too was disappointed with the reception of his 1817 work A Course of Legal Study, he did not venture a second edition until 1836 at which time he complained bitterly of the competition from lowbrow, “crammer” type texts. Ironically, it was an English rather than a domestic text he most resented: Samuel Warren's A Popular and Practical Introduction to Law Studies, which appeared first in 1835 and ran to several editions. Whether it too competed with Murdoch's Epitome must remain an open question for now.

106. On the economics of book publishing in British North America, see Parker, George L., The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada (Toronto, 1985).Google Scholar

107. Marquis, “In Defence of Liberty.”

108. Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Bliss Papers, MG 1 vol. 1604.

109. Bell, D. G., “Paths to Law in the Maritimes, 1810–1825: The Bliss Brothers and their Circle,” Nova Scotia Historical Review 8(2) (1988): 6.Google Scholar At one point Henry declined the offer of a judgeship in Mauritius—wisely, in his brother's view: William Blowers Bliss to Henry Bliss, Aug. 6, 1832, Bliss Papers.

110. William Blowers Bliss to Henry Bliss, Aug. 15, 1833, Bliss Papers. William was appointed to the Supreme Court bench in the spring of 1834.

111. Murdoch, Epitome 1:10.

112. J. S. Thompson, the father of Sir John Thompson, is a good example. Having arrived in Halifax from Ireland in 1829, in 1832 he was already invoking the traditional North American imagery of British corruption and colonial modesty, frugality, and vigor: see his editorials in the Halifax Monthly Magazine.

113. See text accompanying notes 10–11. Marshall did lose his position as Chief Justice of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas when the court was abolished in 1841, but the abolition movement was not directed at him personally. He received a pension for the remainder of his very long life—not a foregone conclusion when judicial posts were abolished or their incumbents retired in colonial Nova Scotia: Clara Greco, “The Superior Court Judiciary of Nova Scotia: A Collective Biography,” in Girard and Phillips, Nova Scotia Essays.

114. Brian Young examines this process in “Dimensions of a Law Practice: Brokerage and Ideology in the Career of George-Étienne Cartier,” in Beyond the Law: Lawyers and Business in Canada, 1830 to 1930, ed. Wilton, Carol (Toronto, 1990), 98–99.Google Scholar

115. Kolish, Evelyn, “The Impact of the Change in Legal Metropolis on the Development of Lower Canada's Legal System: Judicial Chaos and Legislative Paralysis in the Civil Law, 1791–1838,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 3 (1988): 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also her unpublished doctoral thesis, “Changements dans le droit privé au Quebec/Bas-Canada entre 1760–1840: attitudes et réactions des contemporains” (Université de Montreal, 1980), and her “L'introduction de la faillite au Bas-Canada: conflit social ou national?” Revue historique de l'Amérique francaise 40 (1986): 215.

116. This tendency is redressed with regard to Quebec law in his later article, “Droit comparé et droit québécois,” Revue Juridique Thémis 24 (1990): 341.

117. Grant, George, Lament for a Nation (Toronto, 1963).Google Scholar

118. On the successes, failures and difficulties of “legal transplants,” see O. Kahn-Freund, “On Uses and Misuses of Comparative Law” Modern Law Review 37 (1974): 1; Watson, Alan, “Legal Transplants and Law Reform,” Law Quarterly Review 92 (1976): 79Google Scholar; Stein, P., “Uses, Misuses—and Nonuses of Comparative Law,” Northwestern University Law Review 72 (1977): 198.Google Scholar

119. Baker, “Upper Canadian Legal Thought,” 285.

120. Tancelin, Maurice, “Contributions du Québec à la recherche des causes du déclin ou de l'éclipse du jus commune,” Il Foro Italiano 207 (1983): 3.Google Scholar

121. Swift, A System of the Laws of Connecticut 1:37.

122. The American Jurist and Law Magazine, in spite of a positively omnivorous approach to European legal literature in the period 1829–43, noticed virtually no British North American publications. Two exceptions were Berton's, G. F. S.Reports of Cases adjudged in the Supreme Court of New Brunswick, commencing in Hilary Term 1835 (Fredericton, 1835)Google Scholar; and Sewell's, J.An Essay on the Juridical History of France, so far as it relates to the Law of the Province of Lower Canada: Read at a special meeting of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, the 31st day of May, 1824 (Quebec, 1824).Google Scholar Both were favorably reviewed in the April, 1838, number of the journal, and I am grateful to David Bell for bringing this reference to my attention. The Epitome was never reviewed.

123. The role of France as a “legal metropolis” for Quebec more closely approximates the role Rome played for medieval Europe, and illustrates one aspect of Glenn's thesis much better than does English Canada. After 1760, the day-to-day contact with France, always attenuated at best, was forever ruptured. The anticlerical Revolution subsequently inspired horror in a profoundly Roman Catholic and deferential society, and placed a further barrier to harmonious relations between France and her erstwhile colony. To this day, as Glenn notes, Quebec jurists remain attached to the pre-revolutionary French legal tradition, and the political and temporal remoteness of the French legal ideal allow a certain critical stance, which has had little historical equivalent in English Canada. Only in the 1980s, with the “patriation” of the Canadian constitution including a Charter of Rights, the advent of free trade with the United States, and the closer integration of Britain in the EEC, are the conditions ripe for any similar process of disengagement vis-à-vis the English legal tradition. On the notion of “legal metropolis,” see Kolish, Evelyn, “Change in Legal Metropolis.”Google Scholar

124. Glenn, , “Persuasive Authority,” 263.Google Scholar

125. Difficult, but not impossible, as Davies, Gwendolyn reminds us in her catalog of internationally published Maritime authors: Studies in Maritime Legal History (Fredericton, 1991)Google Scholar, 9. Ironically, when Canadian authors succeed internationally, they are appropriated by the United States: thus Thomas Chandler Haliburton is recognized as the “father of American humour,” Alice Munro as “one of America's leading writers of short fiction.”

126. Keefer, Kulyk, Under Eastern Eyes, xi.Google Scholar

127. Under Eastern Eyes, 70. It may be appropriate to remark here that Murdoch, like his cousin Akins, scarcely ever left Nova Scotia. Akins is known to have travelled only twice, once each to Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. There is no evidence of Murdoch ever leaving the province, although it strains credulity to suggest that he never set foot in New Brunswick. Murdoch refused the invitation of his friend S. G Forman to accompany the latter on an extensive tour of Central Canada and the Ohio Valley in 1826: Forman to Murdoch, Oct. 31, 1826, T. B. Akins Papers, Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG1, vol. 8, no. 21. Lack of means was clearly not the problem—both men were too attached to the land of their birth to care to leave it even for brief periods. For the sense of rootedness in Maritime literature, see Davies, Gwendolyn, Studies in Maritime Literary History, 9–22, 192–99.Google Scholar