Subseries 5 - Law Reform Commission of Canada

0.8 m of textual records

In 1971, I was appointed a full-time commissioner of the new Law Reform Commission of Canada (file 2). I spent only one year in Ottawa, however, because I came back to the U of T in July 1972 to become dean of the Law School. The files contain records of our official Commission meetings, personnel hired, and our struggle to sort out our research program (files 4-8). A lot of effort in that first year was devoted to the task of consulting widely to determine what we should be doing (file 7). The files also contain records of selected projects, such as the evidence project, the administrative law project, and the East York Diversion Project (files 10-13). In March 1972 I gave a talk at the Lawyers Club in Toronto on the work of the Law Reform Commission, which was then published in the Law Society Gazette (file 15).

Box 88 contains, for the most part, records of my dealings with the Commission after I left it. The Law Reform Commission financially and otherwise supported my study, which was published in 1975 by Carswell/Methuen as Access to the Law: A Study Prepared for the Law Reform Commission of Canada. Files on that project can be found in the Access to the Law Subseries in Series 5. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s I did considerable work for the Commission. In the early 1980s I did work for the Commission on national security and helped prepare Working Paper 49, Crimes Against the State, that came out in 1986 (files 19-22). Similarly, I helped prepare Working Paper 63, Double Jeopardy, Pleas and Verdicts, which was published in 1991 (files 25-28). I was also actively involved in the 1980s in the Criminal Codification project (files 29-33). In addition, I was the liaison person for the Commission at the Faculty of Law during part of the 1980s (file 24) and gave a paper on rewards at the Financial Incentive Conference in Calgary in 1990 (file 36). Finally, after the Law Reform Commission was shut down, I took part in a conference in 1994 which helped influence the shape of the new Law Commission (file 37).

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