Courts, Assemblies, and Privilege: Individual Rights in the Colonies in The Early 19th Century
Lyndsay Campbell, Associate Professor, Department of History, Law and Society, University of Calgary
Published April 19,
Lyndsay Campbell hosted a talk entitled Courts, Assemblies, and Privilege: Individual Rights in the Colonies during the Technologies of Justice Conference session Doing and Knowing Law. The conference took place from January 26 to 27, 2018 at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario.
Campbell asked, “What is law?” She pressed the question of what the legislature can legally do in terms of parliamentary privilege, and whether assemblies have the same abilities as the House of Commons. She highlighted the flip-flopping in the House of Commons in the 19th century and how the chance and occurrence of everyone suing everyone was causative of the reining in of colonial legislatures in the 1800s. She spoke of defining law and the power of the House of Commons historically and how this applies to us in a modern sense.
