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Faculty of Law

Hamar Foster, KC

Hamar Foster, KC

Professor Emeritus

Contact:
250-598-6619
Credentials:
BA (Queen's), MA (Sussex), LLB (UBC), MJur (Auckland).
Area of expertise:
Legal History, legal history of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations

Biography

Hamar Foster, K.C., F.R.Hist.S., Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow, 1970-71, Commonwealth Scholar, 1970-71, Osgoode Fellow in Legal History 1987.
 
Law Clerk to the Chief Justice of British Columbia 1974-75, articled with Shrum, Liddle & Hebenton (now McCarthy Tetrault) 1975-76, partner in Prowse, Williamson, and Foster 1976-78 (Vancouver).
 
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria 1978-81, Associate Professor 1981-93, Professor, 1993- 2015, Professor emeritus, 2015-, Associate Dean, 1998-2000. Adjunct Professor of Law, University of British Columbia, for several years and Professor, Akitsiraq Law Program, Iqaluit, Nunavut in 2002.
 
Teaching responsibilities: Legal Process, Evidence, Criminal Law and Procedure, Trial and Appellate Advocacy, Aboriginal Law, Property Law, and Legal History.
 
Member of the BC Bar since 1976 and, from January to June 2001, a Resident Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, UVic.
  
As of June, 2015, a retired member of the Law Society of British Columbia.

Education

  • BA (Philosophy, with First Class Honours), Queen's University;
  • MA (History of Ideas), University of Sussex);
  • LLB (Law), Brit. Col.;
  • MJur (Law, with Distinction), University of Auckland.

Selected books

  • Peter Cook, Neil Vallance, John Lutz, Graham Brazier and Hamar Foster, ed. To Share Not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty-Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, published by UBC Press in 2021. [This is a collection of essays generated by a three-day Symposium held February 24th- 26th, 2017, at the Songhees Nation Reserve in Victoria.]
  • Hamar Foster, John McLaren and Wes Pue, ed. The British Columbia Court of Appeal, 1910-2010, BC Studies No. 162 (Summer 2009).
  • Hamar Foster, Benjamin L. Berger and Andrew Buck, ed. The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: The Osgoode Society and UBC Press 2008)
  • Hamar Foster, Heather Raven and Jeremy Webber, ed. Let Right Be Done: Aboriginal Title, the Calder Case and the Future of Indigenous Rights (Vancouver: UBC Press 2007).
  • Hamar Foster and John McLaren, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. VI: British Columbia and the Yukon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Legal History 1995)
  • John McLaren, Hamar Foster, and Chet Orloff, ed. Law for the Elephant, Law for the Beaver: Essays in the Legal History of the North American West (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre and Pasadena: Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society 1992).

Selected recent articles and chapters

  • “Sharp as a Knife: Judge Begbie and Reconciliation,” in John Borrows and Kent McNeil, ed. Voicing Identity: Cultural Appropriation and Indigenous Issues (University of Toronto Press 2022) at 209-251.
  • “Two ‘White’ Perspectives on Indigenous Resistance: Emily Carr’s Klee Wyck, the RCMP and Title to the Kitwancool Valley in 1927,” Manitoba Law Journal, vol. 43, issue 1 (2020) at 1-58. [This was the 2018 DeLloyd Guth Lecture in Legal History.]
  • “The Royal Proclamation of 1763 in British Columbia: An Indigenous Magna Carta’s Chequered Canadian Career” in Catherine Macmillan and Charlotte Smith, ed. Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights: From Magna Carta to Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2018) at 269-295.
  • “One Good Thing: Law and Elevator Etiquette in the Indian Territories,” in Myra Rutherdale, Kerry Abel, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, ed. Roots of Entanglement: Essays in the History of Native-Newcomer Relations (Toronto: U. of T Press 2018) at 289-312. [This a republication of the essay published in 37 The Advocates’ Quarterly (May 2010) under a slightly different title).

Recognition and awards

 Awarded the Terry Wuester Master Teacher Award in 2010 and 2014. Awarded a Clio Lifetime Achievement Award for British Columbia History by the Canadian Historical Association in 2019.

 

Special projects

 A series of articles on the Doctrine of Discovery, Papal Bulls, the role of churches and appeals to British justice in the campaign for Aboriginal title in the period 1900-1928.