Legal archives offer extraordinary opportunities for understanding intimacies across time and space. Family and Justice in the Archives presents a series of fascinating historical essays that unpack stories of familial, domestic, and sexual intimacy from the records left behind by legal processes, providing rich new insights about family, gender, race, sex, culture, identity, and daily life.

Contributors examine the written traces left by public proceedings that occurred in legally sanctioned spaces of social regulation, from notaries’ offices to criminal and civil courtrooms to legislatures. Focusing on the past two centuries and spanning five continents, the essays explore a wide range of topics including marriage, citizenship, inheritance, indentured servitude, infanticide, juvenile justice, parental abuse, bigamy, and sex work. Mindful of the ethical questions that arise when scrutinizing the details of people’s most vulnerable moments, these authors also demonstrate how individuals navigated and sometimes challenged legal prescriptions and processes in order to address systemic imbalances of power.

Family and Justice in the Archives reveals the wealth of detail that emerges from a close reading of documents generated by legal processes in the past, offering valuable new perspectives on the complex personal lives of so-called ordinary people in former times.

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Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator. Caught was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is now a major CBC television series starring Allan Hawco. February won CBC’s Canada Reads competition, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Alligator was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean region), and was a national bestseller. Her story collection Open was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and a national bestseller. Her most recent work is a collection of short stories called Something for Everyone. Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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