Reckoning with Racism

256 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in., 75 b/w photos 978-0-7748-6827-3 PB $30.95 USD / £23.00 GBP 978-0-7748-6822-8 HC $75.00 USD / £60.00 GBP also available as an e-book

SERIES: Landmark Cases in Canadian Law

CONSTANCE BACKHOUSE is a Distinguished University Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa. She has written numerous prize-winning books, including Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 and Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada. She has been awarded the Killam Prize, the Molson Prize, and the Governor General’s Persons Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada.

In 1997, complacency about the racial neutrality of a predominantly white judiciary was shattered as the Supreme Court of Canada considered a complaint of judicial racial bias for the first time. The judge in question was Corrine Sparks, the country’s first Black female judge. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case. A white Halifax police officer had arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke-hold, and charged him with assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Sparks remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal held, but most of the white appeal judges critiqued her comments, based on the tradition that the legal system was non-racist unless proven otherwise. That became a matter of wide debate.

This book assesses the case of alleged anti-white judicial bias, the surrounding excitement, the dramatic effects on those involved, and the significance for the Canadian legal system. This book is co-published in association with the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.

Constance Backhouse 978-0-7748-3632-6

L. Jane McMillan 978-0-7748-3749-1