Eric H. Reiter, PhD

My research and teaching focus on historical and comparative aspects of law in Quebec, Canada, and beyond. My recent book, Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870-1920 (University of Toronto Press and Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Canadian Historical Association Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History, the 2020 Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research, and the 2021 Prix de la Fondation du Barreau du Québec (catégorie monographie). A new project is underway, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, on litigation involving fatal workplace accidents in nineteenth-century Quebec.
I am currently co-editor-in-chief for English manuscripts of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and am a member of the Centre interuniversitaire d'études québécoises.

Education

BA Cornell; MA, PhD Toronto; LLB, BCL, LLM McGill; member (retired) of the Barreau du Québec

• HIST 315 Rights and Freedoms in Canadian Society

Representative publications

Reiter, Eric H. Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2019). https://utorontopress.com/ca/wounded-feelings-2  

Reiter, Eric H. “The Trials of Caroline Ferguson: Reputation and Litigation in Quebec City, 1852-1857,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law Volume XII: New Essays in Women’s History, ed. Lori Chambers and Joan Sangster (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2023), 20-50.

Simmonds, Alecia and Eric H. Reiter. “The Legal History of Emotions,” in The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, ed. Katie Barclay and Peter Stearns (London: Routledge, 2023), 423-39.

Reiter, Eric H. “The Case of the Theologizing Blacksmith: Liberalism, Conservative Catholicism, and Defamation in 1870s Quebec,” in Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History: Essays in Honour of G. Blaine Baker, ed. Ian C. Pilarczyk, Angela Fernandez and Brian Young (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 382-412.

Reiter, Eric H. “Family Defamation in the Quebec Civil Courts: The View from the Archives” in Lyndsay Campbell, Ted McCoy and Mélanie Méthot, eds., Canada’s Legal Pasts: Looking Forward, Looking Back (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2020), 11-29. https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/112105/9781773851174_chapter01.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y

Reiter, Eric H. “Cultures of Conflict: Welcoming and Resisting ‘Non-Western’ Influence in Alternative Dispute Resolution” in René Provost, ed., Culture in the Domains of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 223-246.

Reiter, Eric H. “Tools of the Trade: Three Propositions on Governance,” in Richard Janda, Rosalie Jukier and Daniel Jutras, eds., The Unbounded Level of the Mind: Rod Macdonald’s Legal Imagination (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 155-160.

Reiter, Eric H. “Translating the Untranslatable: Historical Aspects of the Protection of Honour and Other Extrapatrimonial Interests in Quebec Civil Law” in Alexandra Popovici, Lionel Smith & Régine Tremblay, eds., Les intraduisibles du droit civil (Montreal: Thémis, 2014), 157-184.

Reiter, Eric H. “From Shaved Horses to Aggressive Churchwardens: Social and Legal Aspects of Moral Injury in Lower Canada” in G. Blaine Baker & Donald Fyson, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Quebec and the Canadas (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2013), 460-502.

Otis, Louise, Catherine Rousseau-Saine and Eric H. Reiter. “Confidentiality and Judicial Mediation in Canada” in Tania Sourdin and Archie Zariski, eds., The Multi-Tasking Judge: Comparative Judicial Dispute Resolution (Sydney, Australia: Thomson Reuters, 2013) 183-201.

Reiter, Eric H. “Nuisance and Neighbourhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Montreal: Drysdale v. Dugas in Its Contexts” in Eric Tucker, James Muir & Bruce Ziff, eds., Property on Trial: Canadian Cases in Context (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2012), 35-69.

Otis, Louise & Eric H. Reiter. “The Reform of the United Nations Administration of Justice System: The United Nations Appeals Tribunal After One Year,” Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals 10 (2011): 405-428, online: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/36152/.

Reiter, Eric H. “Fact, Narrative, and the Judicial Uses of History: Delgamuukw and Beyond,” Indigenous Law Journal 8 (2010): 55-79.

Reiter, Eric H. “Privacy and the Charter: Protection of People or Places?” Canadian Bar Review 88 (2009): 119-146, online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2465146.

Reiter, Eric H. “Rethinking Civil-Law Taxonomy: Persons, Things, and the Problem of Domat’s Monster,” Journal of Civil Law Studies 1 (2008): 189-213, online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1595046.

Reiter,Eric H. “Gaius, le droit des personnes et la common law anglo-américaine” in Jacques Bouineau, ed., Personne et res publica, vol. 2 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008) 163-174.

Otis, Louise & Eric H. Reiter. “Front-Line Justice,” Virginia Journal of International Law 46 (2006): 677-716, online: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/6484/.

Otis, Louise & Eric H. Reiter. “Mediation by Judges: A New Phenomenon in the Transformation of Justice,” Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal 6 (2006): 351-403.

Otis, Louise and Eric H. Reiter. “Judicial Mediation in Quebec” in Nadja Alexander, ed., Global Trends in Mediation, 2d ed. (Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law International, 2006) 107-119.

Reiter, Eric H. “Imported Books, Imported Ideas: Reading European Jurisprudence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 445-492.

Reiter, Eric H. “Personality and Patrimony: Comparative Perspectives on the Right to One’s Image,” Tulane Law Review 76 (2002): 673-726.