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18 Can. L. Libr. 7 (1993)
Prairie Quires: The History of Law Reporting in Manitoba and Saskatchewan

handle is hein.journals/callb18 and id is 19 raw text is: PRAIRIE QUIRES: THE HISTORY OF LAW REPORTING IN MANITOBA AND SASKATCHEWAN' By Ken Whiteway Ken Whiteway Photo: Gibson Photo (1977) Ltd. Le reportage de la jurisprudence des Prairies de I'est a W assur6 en grande partie par des 6diteurs situ6s dans les grands centres urbains des autres r6gions du Canada. Ily a toutefois une quantit6 importante de jurisprudence provenant des Prairies elles-m~mes qui s'est ajout~e au corpus jurisprudentiel canadien. Introduction The most striking feature about any aspect of the legal history of Manitoba and Saskatchewan is its brevity. The use of the term North- West Territories first occurs in fed- eral legislation of 18691 which an- ticipated the incorporation of the sprawling area known as Rupert's Land (formerly under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company) and the Territories into the newly-created Dominion of Canada.2 It seems likely that the attention of the federal government was directed westward largely through the activi- ties of Metis leader Louis David Riel between 1870 and 1885. Certainly, unrest among the Metis people, and the lack of a judicial and administra- tive structure with which to deal with it, hastened legislative action. In quick succession, there appeared the Manitoba Act, 1870 which received royal assent on May 12, 1870, and created a new province of approxi- mately 100 square miles4, and the Rupert's Land and North-Western TerritoryOrderof June 23, 1870, which admitted Rupert's Land and the rest of the territory into the union. In 1882, the Northwest Territories were divided into the provisional districts of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Athabaska and, on September 1, 1905, Saskatchewan entered Con- federation as a province under the terms of the Saskatchewan Act.5 Meanwhile, back in London, Stanley Shaw Bond had, by 1908, gained control of the publishing firm founded by Henry Butterworth in 1818. Bond is often credited with delaying the development of dis- tinctive legal systems in the Domin- ions through his aggressive market- ing of works such as The English and Empire Digest and Halsbury's Laws of England. Ever on the look-out for new opportunities, Bond incorpo- rated his Canadian division, Butterworth & Co. (Canada) Ltd., on November 14, 1912, and had an office setup in Winnipeg under Owen Elliot who managed Butterworths' Canadian operation from then until 1957. There are apocryphal stories that Bond chose Winnipeg as the site for his office by sending for a map of Canada and sticking a pin in the middle of it. However, Owen Elliot records that Bond had once stopped in Winnipeg while returning from Australia to London. He found it to beaflourishing town (the third largest in Canada), and was assured by local businessmen that it was the ideal centre. Bitterexperiencewas to prove that, while Winnipeg was the com- mercial centre for destinations west, it was a country town to the conser- vative easterners of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces.6 But- terworths opened a small office in Toronto in 1923 and, by 1925, had moved its entire operation to that city. The year of Butterworths' entry into Canada, 1912, was a banner year in Canadian legal publishing. It also marked the beginning of the Dominion Law Reports by the Canada Law Book Company, and of the Western Weekly Reports by Burroughs & Co. of Calgary. Burroughs had recently broken away from Canada Law Book to set up his own company. In 1919, he started the ambitious publication of the Canadian Encyclo- pedic Digest (Western); unfortunately for him, its original form was so close to that of Butterworths' Halsbury's that he was forced to rewrite the first issue when challenged on copyright infringement.7 (In passing, and just to account for another Canadian publisher, it should be noted that Richard De Boo joined the Butter- worths' staff in 1921. He worked for them off and on until 1940 when he founded his own publishing house.) Burroughs had managed to side- step litigation with Butterworths, but Canada Law Book was not so fortu- nate. The latter two companies en- tered into a long court battle over which of them had the right to market the first edition of Halsbury's Laws in Canada. The case went all the wayto the judicial Committee of the Privy Council and Canada Law Book ulti- mately lost. Ironically, the account of their loss was among the first cases to appear in their own report series, Dominion Law Reports.8 This brief period during the in- fancy of Canadian legal publishing This is the first in a proposed series of articles, by various authors, on the history of law reporting in Canada. It is anticipated that each issue of Canadian Law Libraries will contain one or two articles in the series until the series is completed. This article was received August 4, 1992 and accepted November 5, 1992. 2 Ken Whiteway is Acting Head, Law Library, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. 1993 Canadian Law Libraries/Biblioth~ques de droit canadiennes, VoL 18, No. 1 7

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