It’s been an odd few weeks in the realm of ancient traditions, what with the discovery of Richard III and now the first papal resignation in six hundred years (and the first voluntary one since the thirteenth century, when Celestine V stepped down in 1294). As of 8pm (2pm EST) on Thursday, the Pope will no longer be the Pope, and the College of Cardinals will have to go about the business of electing his successor, which is a tradition with a long, long history and plenty of pomp, circumstance, and maybe just a bit of superstition.

The election of a Pope is a significant event, if for no other reason than the incoming pontiff will have to contend with the fallout for the seemingly endless abuse scandals and will likely need to grapple with the ever-increasing need for modernization and reform. Despite the fact that the Church’s influence is largely on the wane in the west, there are still over a billion Catholics worldwide (and rising), so it is enormously important for the world at large.

Not surprisingly, for an institution with a nearly two thousand year history, there is a highly-developed system of Catholic Canon Law. While, like most religious legal codes, it does not have the full force of law in most jurisdictions, it is every bit as nuanced and extensive as many legal systems. Saint-Paul University in Ottawa even has a full-blown Faculty of Canon Law (the only one in Canada, although there are five in the Vatican).

Depending on how good your Latin is, the 1983 Code of Canon Law is available on the Vatican’s website in its intended language (as well as many others, including English). There is also pretty impressive archive of documents, including the Bible, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Vatican II documents, and Official Acts of the Holy See. The current rules surrounding the papal conclave and the election of the Pope are not in the Code of Canon Law, but rather in the Apostolic Constitution Universi Domenici Gregis implemented by John Paul II in 1996 (which can be found here).

While Canon Law is not one of the collection’s primary focuses here at the Osgoode Law Library, we do have a few interesting works that deal with the subject. The majority of the texts are in the KBU2000+ and X561 ballparks on the shelves (with the latter being a shelf below the lamentably underutilized Visigothic Code), and include the commentaries The Canon Law: Letter and Spirit and the imagininatively-titled Canon Law. We also have a number of special collection texts in Latin and French, including the 1681 Corpus Juris Civilis and the succinctly-titled Consiliorvm, sive Responsorvm, d. Iacobi Menochii … liber primus-duodecimus : Cui in hac postrema omnium editione indicem, generalem etiam addidimus, qui complectitur ea omnia que notatu digna, in ipsis duodecim Consiliorum libris leguntur, alphabetico ordine in studiosorum commodum, & gratiam in vnum collectus from 1609 (and no, I’m not sure what it means either).

So if, over the coming weeks, you find yourself wondering what the statutory basis for the conclave is, as always we at the Osgoode Law Library can help you out!

P.S. If you’ve ever wondered what the Vatican Library is like (answer: amazing), this article from the New Yorker entitled “God’s Librarians” should set you straight. The Library’s website is also worth a gander as well.

We’ve been weeding the collection of reference materials now integrated into the Library’s Core Collection. (Don’t worry, we’re not throwing anything out; we’re just moving many of the older or no-longer-topical materials to the stacks or into storage.) In the process, we’ve found some pretty arcane and interesting things. This is one of them.

In 1955, the British House of Commons Library published a small pamphlet (“Document no. 1″ in a new series) entitled Acts of Paliament: Some Distinctions in their Nature and Numbering .Though only eight pages long, the pamphlet provides great detail on the disctinctions between Statutes, Acts, Public and Private Acts (Le Roy le veult vs Soit fait comme il est désiré), Local Acts, Personal Acts, Private Acts, Local and Personal Acts, Local and Private Acts and other variations.and combinations and how these meanings changed and merged from the 13th to the 20th centures. There’s also information on how the nature of an act determined whether it could be received as evidence in a court of law and how it might be interpreted. Further, there’s information on how these acts would be collected, organized into “chapters”, printed, numbered with arabic or roman numerals in upper or lower case, in roman or italic font (all of which are significant in the numbering systems) and many more arcane minutiae than most of us would care to know but  which some of our readers will, I suspect, find fascinating!

For the true devotee of legal research, this publication is a must-read!

The Quebec Conference 1864

Wrong.  Another simple question at the Reference Desk last  week.  But we all know English law was received into Canada at some point, don’t we? We may think we know that, but I didn’t have any idea just how complicated the answer to the question of what law was received and when until I went looking for a quick confirmation of what I thought I “knew”.  The shortest answer I found was the seventeen page summary of the rules of reception in volume 1 of Professor Hogg’s  Constitutional  Law of Canada, which only touched on the major issues discussed in J. E. Cote’s two major studies of the subject ((1963-1964) 3 Alta L Rev 262-292 and (1977) 15 Alta L Rev 29-92).  In fewer than seventeen pages, this is what I found out: 1.  There are British common law rules governing when and how English law becomes the law of a colony.  2.  These rules don’t apply to Imperial statutes that were passed by the English Parliament and intended by it to be applicable in one or more of its colonies (i.e. they don’t form part of the law of England).  3.  The Statute of Westminster, 1931dealt with these statutes and prohibits  future Imperial statutes from having effect in self-governing (former) colonies unless that government requests it.  4.  The British common law rules on reception depend on whether the colony in question was “settled” as a colony or was “conquered/ceded.”  5.  For “settled” colonies, the rules deem the law of England to have been brought to the colony with the settlers, unless, of course, English law was unsuitable for the colony.  [Pages and pages of discussion on what "settled" means (Nova Scotia is deemed to be "settled" even though it was ceded by France to Britain in 1713) and what "unsuitable" means omitted.]  English statutes enacted after that time were inapplicable (except the type described in point 2). [Pages and pages on whether it is the date of settlement of the colony or the date on which it established its first legislature that prevails.]  6.  For “conquered/ceded” colonies, e.g. New France, the general rule was to leave the existing law in force to the extent possible except for constitutional laws or barbaric ones until the authorities changed them. [Pages and pages of discussion on which colonies were considered to have been conquered and which laws were left intact and which not (existing Aboriginal rules were simply disregarded and Scots law apparently didn't count where Scottish settlers colonized) and what happened when places switched back and forth between French rule and English rule, ensue.  Note English criminal law was substituted for French criminal law by the Quebec Act 1774.]  7.  Things get really messy when boundaries change or English statutes were repealed or amended after the date of reception.  8.  By and large, the date of reception of English law into what is now Ontario is October 15, 1792, but don’t quote me on any of this!