BA, MA (Toronto), PhD (Warwick), (cross-appointed with the Faculty of Arts)

Professor Hay has been cross-appointed to Osgoode Hall Law School and York’s Department of History since 1981, having taught previously at Memorial University of Newfoundland. One of Canada’s leading legal historians, Professor Hay’s research has dealt primarily with the history of criminal procedure, punishment, and crime in England and Canada, and also with the comparative history of labour law. He is currently involved in an international project on the evolution of the contract of employment throughout the common law world over four centuries. He has a forthcoming book with Staffordshire Record Society called Crown Side Cases in the Court of King’s Bench and is co-editor of Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Selected Publications

Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Friends of the Chief Justice: The William Osgoode Correspondence in the Archives of the Law Society of Upper Canada (Law Society of Upper Canada, 1990)

Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750-1850 (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Labour, Law and Crime in Historical Perspective (London: Tavistock, 1987)

Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in 18th-Century England (London: Allen Lane, New York: Pantheon, 1975)