Constance Backhouse is a professor of law, distinguished university professor, and university research chair at the University of Ottawa. She obtained her B.A. from the University of Manitoba (1972), her LL.B. from Osgoode Hall (1975), and her LL.M. from Harvard Law School (1979). She was called to the Ontario Bar in 1978. She teaches feminist law, criminal law, human rights, and labour law. She is the author of many award-winning legal history books, including Petticoats & Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (1991), Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canadian Law, 1900–1950 (1999) and The Heiress vs. the Establishment: Mrs. Campbell's Campaign for Legal Justice (2004). She received the Law Society Medal in 1998 and an Honorary Doctorate from the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2002. She has served as an elected bencher of the Law Society from 2002. She became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004.

Constance Backhouse's profile page

• Joint winner, Willard Hurst Prize in American Legal History

"These richly textured and grippingly recreated trials — battered women who fought back, self-respecting prostitutes and saleswomen beaten down, trailblazers ostracized, defiant daughters subdued, domestic servants commodified and mothers denied their children or compelled to let their newborns die - will both fire and break your heart. In weaving nineteenth-century social history with the seamless fabric of laws and legal institutions that enforced the reproductive, sexual, racial and occupational inequalities shaping women's oppression today. Professor Backhouse raises provocative questions about the limits of reformers and reformism. Whether to discover lost heroines come alive or to confront the maleness of law, curl up with Petticoats and Prejudice for a memorable read."— “Sheila McIntyre, Faculty of Law, Queen's University