Subseries 5 - Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR)

0.6 m of textual records

Sometime in 1984 I had been asked by Fraser Mustard, the President of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, to get involved in their population health project. John Evans apparently thought that I would be a good person to head it. I declined because I wanted to finish my Shortis book, but got involved in the task force that Rob Prichard organised to look at a possible project for law for the CIAR (files 1-5). A group of scholars met during 1984 and 1985 and produced a report for the CIAR (files 4-5). John Hagan, a sociologist at the Law School, who, along with Rob was the co-chair of the group, had produced for the committee a background paper on the future of empirical research in law (files 4-5). The committee also looked at potential fellows and researchers. The Institute decided to proceed with a project in law looking at sanctions and rewards in the legal system.

I was appointed as the director of the program in 1985 and as a fellow of the Institute in 1986. The program looked at sanctions and rewards in the legal system. The first stage consisted of papers by experts in a number of disciplines on various approaches to sanctions and rewards. This resulted in 1989 in a collection of essays, Sanctions and Rewards in the Legal System, which is documented in detail in files in the Sanctions and Rewards boxes. A second stage involved seven specific research projects, which are also documented in the Sanctions and Rewards boxes. These were published in 1990 in a volume, Securing Compliance: Seven Case Studies. One of the specific projects was on traffic safety which Michael Trebilcock, Kent Roach and I published in a separate volume in 1990 as Regulating Traffic Safety, found in the Traffic Safety boxes. There was to be a third stage with even broader studies of certain specific areas, but these never got very far.

The project had shifted towards Quebec. The change had started in 1987 with the ‘Quebec Network’, which was supported by David Johnston, the principal of McGill and the chair of the Advisory Committee of the project. Rod Macdonald, the dean of McGill Law School, took over as director. The research focus was to be on pluralism, with Harry Arthurs taking over as chair of the Advisory Committee. I was invited to stay on and worked as well as I could within the concept. Kent Roach, Michael Code and I got an SSHRC grant to do an empirical study into the administration of justice in Niagara County, New York, and Niagara County, Ontario. I produced various papers on plea bargaining and other subjects for the many meetings we had.

Rod Macdonald stepped down after 5 years and Liora Salter of Osgoode took over. New members and associates were added. I started decreasing my involvement with the program. The project struggled to find some common research themes, but in the end it was terminated ‘for financial reasons’ by the Institute, now under the direction of Stefan Dupre.

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