Dr. Lyndsay Campbell
Contact information
Background
Educational Background
Ph.D. Jurisprudence and Social Policy, Univ. of Calif. - Berkeley, 2008
Master of Law(s) University of British Columbia, 1999
J.D. University of British Columbia, 1995
M.A. English Literature, University of Toronto, 1991
B.A. English Literature, University of British Columbia, 1990
Biography
Lyndsay grew up in Calgary but spent most of her post-secondary educational career on the west coast, in British Columbia and California. She practised briefly with McCarthy Tétrault in Vancouver and independently, in connection with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. She clerked for justices L.G. Finch and J.D. Lambert at the British Columbia Court of Appeal.
Lyndsay is cross-appointed between the Faculty of Law and the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts, where she teaches courses in Canadian and American history. In Law, she has tended to teach courses on Canadian legal history and on legal theory and methodology.
Lyndsay is a non-practising member of the British Columbia Bar.
Lyndsay is a former president of the Canadian Law and Society Association and a long-time, active member of the American Society for Legal History.
Research Activities
Lyndsay's research interests include Canadian and American legal history, the regulation of expression, the interaction between extralegal and legal regulatory strategies, comparisons between Canadian and American approaches to law, and nineteenth-century Canadian constitutionalism.
Lyndsay’s monograph, Truth and Privilege: Libel Law in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1820-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is the first ever joint imprint of the Osgoode Society for Canadian History and the American Society for Legal History’s Studies in Legal History series. Other publications include Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities (Routledge, 2025), co-edited with Shaunnagh Dorsett; Canada’s Legal Pasts: Looking Forward, Looking Back (University of Calgary Press, 2020), co-edited with Ted McCoy and Mélanie Méthot; and Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands in the Age of Emancipation (Carolina Academic Press, 2011), co-edited with Tony Freyer.
Articles on aspects of Canadian legal and constitutional history have appeared in the Law & History Review and the International Journal of the Legal Profession, and an essay on libel law and the professionalization of medicine in Alberta was published in law&history. Articles related to libel law and to the treatment of race in Canadian law have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, the Dalhousie Law Journal, and the Queen's Law Journal. An essay on the 1917 War-Time Elections Act and Canada's "Union" government's strategic disenfranchisement of women and soldiers appears in volume 12 of the Essays in the History of Canadian Law series, edited by Joan Sangster and Lori Chambers. An article on the first “abolition riot” appears in the New England Quarterly. Lyndsay is currently exploring parliamentary privilege and its position in Canadian constitutional history and is also working on a 1970s Saskatchewan case called Cherneskey v Armadale Publishers Ltd (SCC 1978).
Lyndsay particularly welcomes inquiries from those interested in pursuing graduate studies in Canadian and American legal history.
Research
Areas of Research
Projects
This project examines the limits of legislative power and two attendant conflicts between courts and legislatures in the 1830s and 1840s. Stockdale v. Hansard, in the UK, concerned the ability of the House of Commons to use parliamentary privilege to protect its publisher against a libel suit brought by John Stockdale, who did not like the implication that he was a publisher of pornography. Kielley v. Carson began in St. John's, Newfoundland, with name-calling on a street that led to the local assembly's jailing of a local doctor and then a judge and the high sheriff. Kielley sued the speaker of the House of Assembly and others for assault and false imprisonment. The cases led to complicated questions of constitutional law both in the UK and in the colonial world.
In March 1973, two young women law students (both of whom went on to distinguished judicial careers) wrote a letter to the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix calling out as racist the objections being taken to the establishment of a small, local alcohol rehabilitation centre for First Nations and Métis people. They criticized in particular a city councillor named Morris Cherneskey. Cherneskey, who was a leader in the city's Ukrainian community and the Progressive Conservative party, objected to being called a racist and sued the newspaper for libel. The case raised the question of whether newspapers were responsible for the views expressed in their "letters to the editor" section. It went through various twists and turns and eventually landed at the Supreme Court of Canada, which held in 1978 that to establish the "fair comment" defence, a defendant had to be able to point to some person who actually held the opinion. The students had not given evidence, so the newspaper lost. At this time, newspapers were consolidating into concentrated publication enterprises. They mobilized to have legislation passed to strengthen the media's protection against defamation actions. This project explores this case and its implications.
Awards
- Fellow, Constitutional Law and History Program, Institute for Legal Research, University of California, Berkeley. 2008
- William Nelson Cromwell Fellowship in Legal History, 2007
- Dean's Normative Time Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley. 2004
- Regents Intern Fellowship, 2001
- Osgoode Society Legal History Prize, 1998
- SSHRC doctoral fellowship, 1997
Publications
- "The 'Abolition Riot' Redux: Voices, Processes". Lyndsay Campbell. 94(1) New England Quarterly. 7-46. (2021)
- “An Elusive Remedy: A Calgary Chiropodist Complains of Libel, 1916". Lyndsay Campbell and Heidi Exner. 6(1) law&history. 115-142. (2019)
- "S.G.W. Archibald and Liberal Constitutionalism in Nova Scotia, 1820-40". Lyndsay Campbell. 24(1) International Journal of the Legal Profession. 39-45. (2017)
- “Law and Order: Recent Works on Canadian Legal History”. Lyndsay Campbell. 44(2) Acadiensis. 149-160. (2015)
- "Race, Upper Canadian Constitutionalism and 'British Justice'". Lyndsay Campbell. 33(1) Law and History Review. 41-91. (2015)
- "'The Disorderly Conduct of a Few': Crime and Hamilton's Racial Geography in the Early 1850s". Lyndsay Campbell. 28(3) Canadian Journal of Law & Society. 369-386. (2012)
- “Race and the Criminal Justice System in Canada West: Burglary and Murder in Hamilton, 1852-53”. Lyndsay Campbell. 37(2) Queen’s Law Journal. 477-522. (2012)
- "Licence to Publish: Joseph Howe's Contribution to Libel Law in Nova Scotia". Lyndsay Campbell. 29(1) Dalhousie Law Journal. 79-116. (2006)
- "A Slub in the Cloth: R. v. St. Clair and the Pursuit of a 'Clean Theatre' in Toronto, 1912-1913". Lyndsay Campbell. 15(1) Canadian Journal of Law and Society. 187-220. (2000)
- "Roads Not Taken: D. Algar Bailey's Private Prosecutions for Political Libel During World War One". Canadian Journal of Law and Society. (2026)
- "The War-time Elections Act (1917) and the History of Canadian Women’s Suffrage". Lyndsay Campbell. In Joan Sangster and Lori Chambers, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. XII: New Perspectives on Gender and the Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2023). 213-43. (2023)
- Truth and Privilege: Libel Law in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1820-1840. Lyndsay Campbell. Cambridge University Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the Studies in Legal History series of the American Society for Legal History (forthcoming). (2022)
- Canada’s Legal Past: Looking Forward, Looking Back. Lyndsay Campbell; Ted McCoy; Melanie Methot. University of Calgary Press. (2020)
- Truth and Privilege: Libel Treatises and the Transmission of Legal Norms in the Early Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American World. Lyndsay Campbell. In Angela Fernandez and Markus Dubber, eds., Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise. 165-180. (2012)
- Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands in the Age of Emancipation. Tony Freyer; Lyndsay Campbell. Carolina Academic Press. (2011)
- "Starkie's Adventures in North America: The Emergence of Libel Law". Lyndsay Campbell . In Hamar Foster, Benjamin L. Berger, and A. R. Buck, eds., The Grand Experiment: Law & Legal Culture in British Settler Societies. 196-207. (2008)
- Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities. Shaunnagh Dorsett. Routledge. (2025)
- "Constituting a Colonial Crisis: Kielley v Carson, St. John's, 1838-43". Campbell and Dorsett eds, Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities (Routledge, 2025). 35-61. (2025)
- Legislatures on the Edge of Empire: Beaumont v. Barrett and Kielley v. Carson. Annual meeting of the Law and Society Association. (2022)
- Constituting a Colonial Crisis: Newfoundland in the 1830s. Legal Histories of Empires Conference . (2022)
- "Lost Instructions, Borrowed Precedents, and Other Difficulties: Knowing Constitutional Law in the Northern British Atlantic Colonies in the Early 19th Century". Lyndsay Campbell . Annual meeting of the Law and Society Association. (2020)
- "Privilege and Punishment: Stockdale v. Hansard at Home and Abroad". Lyndsay Campbell . British Legal History conference. (2019)
- "The War-Time Elections Act (1917) and the History of Women's Suffrage. Lyndsay Campbell . Annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. (2019)
- "Disfranchisement, Women and War: The War-Time Elections Act (1917)". Lyndsay Campbell. Annual meeting of the Canadian Law and Society Association. (2019)
- Coverture in the Archives: The Strange Cases of Sarepta Hix, Charlotte Hunt and Alice Holbrook". Lyndsay Campbell. Family and Justice in the Archives conference (Concordia University). (2019)
- “Political Scandals of World War I: An Alberta View.”. Lyndsay Campbell. Midwinter meeting of the Canadian Law and Society Association. (2019)
- “An Uncertain Remedy: A Calgary Chiropodist Complains of Libel, 1916". Lyndsay Campbell and Heidi Exner. Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand annual conference. (2018)
- “Politics and Procedure: The Libel Trials of D. Algar Bailey, 1916-18". Lyndsay Campbell and Heidi Exner. Australia New Zealand Law and History Society annual conference. (2018)
- “Lessons from the Rock: Kielley v Carson and the Canadian History of Parliamentary Privilege". Lyndsay Campbell. Legal History and Empires: Perspectives from the Colonized conference. (2018)
- “Courts, Assemblies and Privilege: Individual Rights in the Colonies in the Early Nineteenth Century". Lyndsay Campbell. Technologies of Justice conference. (2018)
- “The Jurisdiction of Colonial Legislatures and the Great (Forgotten) Case of Stockdale v. Hansard". Lyndsay Campbell. Canada’s Legal Past: Future Directions in Canadian Legal History conference. (2017)
- “The Transmission of Constitutional Law: Stockdale v. Hansard in the Colonies". Lyndsay Campbell. Joint annual meetings of the Canadian Law and Society Association and the Law and Society Association. (2017)
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