The Rivers and Streams Dispute: A Challenge to the Public/Private Distinction in Nineteenth-Century CanadaCARL STYCHIN
ABSTRACT
As a historical and ideological construct, the public/private distinction was the centrepiece of legal liberalism in the late nineteenth century. The case of McLaren v. Caldwell and the events surrounding the dispute over public rights in privately owned rivers and streams in Ontario exemplified the power of vision in the face of a challenge to the rigid boundaries as between property-holder and state and as between federal and provincial jurisdiction. As the constraining effect of the conceptual categories of liberalism becomes apparent, the reader is forced to grapple with the alternative - widening the discourse by acknowledging the underlying ethical choices and by making decisions about those choices consciously and openly.
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Citation: (1988) 46(2) U.T. Fac. L. Rev. 341.
Copyright © 1988. University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review.
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