Unité et Différence: The Structure of Legal Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century QuebecROBERT YALDEN
ABSTRACT
There is much that one can learn about the nature of contemporary legal and political culture in Quebec by exploring the structure of legal thought in that province shortly after Confederation. The author traces the emergence of the public/private distinction, paying particular attention to debates about federalism and the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1860s and 1870s. He stresses the central role that the property and civil rights clause of the British North America Act came to play in debates about federalism, and argues that the legal analysis presented in these debates exemplified a more general concern about the scope of Quebec's jurisdiction over individuals' interpersonal relations. This focus on private relations, which formed part of a perspective that was profoundly shaped by hostility to state interventionism, gave rise to a structure of legal thought that accounts for Quebec's adoption of Anglo-Canadian visions of public law. The author concludes that, while scholars have considered developing a distinctively Quebecois vision of public law, this project is still struggling to escape constraints imposed by the history underlying the structure of legal thought in Quebec.
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Citation: (1988) 46(2) U.T. Fac. L. Rev. 365.
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