To that end, professors Louise Bélanger-Hardy, Aline Grenon and Yan Campagnolo are undertaking a project to update and republish a seminal two-volume work that introduces Canadian common law and Quebec civil law from a comparative law perspective.
The two volumes, entitled Éléments de common law canadienne: comparaison avec le droit civil québécois (Éditions Yvon Blais) and Elements of Quebec Civil Law: A Comparison with the Common Law of Canada (Carswell), were first published in 2008. The initial research, directed by professors Bélanger-Hardy and Grenon, aimed to fill in a glaring gap in Canadian legal scholarship—namely, the lack of scholarly books enabling readers to properly define and understand Canada’s unique legal duality. Not only are these volumes intended to better inform the legal community about Canada’s two legal systems, but they are also unique in doing so in the language of their readership: an English volume to make civil law accessible to English-speaking lawyers, who usually have a common law background; and a French volume to make common law accessible to French-speaking lawyers, who generally have a civil law background. The work is the only publication of its kind in Canada. After the books were released in 2008, the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research awarded the 2010 Walter Owen Book Prize for the volume on common law to the editors.
Professors Bélanger-Hardy, Grenon and Campagnolo have obtained a $54,000 grant from the Department of Justice, through the Access to Justice in Both Official Languages Support Fund program, to review and update every chapter of the two volumes to ensure they reflect recent legal developments. This new edition will follow the model of the original work, providing in-depth analysis of each topic with the help of a team of legal experts, who will carefully compare a broad range of the components of Canada’s two legal systems.
This work will continue to be an important educational resource for law students in common law and civil law, as well as anyone studying bijuralism and comparative law.
