Canada's Courts: A Social Scientist's Ground-Breaking Account of the Canadian Judicial System McCormick Peter Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1994. 222 pp.

How can we improve our understanding of Canada's judiciary system? What contributions can social science inquiry make to this understanding? Peter McCormick, who teaches political science at the University of Lethbridge, attempts to answer these questions in Canada's Courts. McCormick is no stranger to Canada's legal system; he has published extensively on the Canadian judiciary, especially at the appellate level. His effort in Canada's Courts system is only partly successful, however, and the reason lies not in the nature of his inquiry but in the need to develop clearer, more precise conceptual approaches to courts. Social science research inevitably simplifies the world to understand it or at least self-consciously chooses to study only certain aspects of a phenomenon if it is to comprehend its complexities. McCormick's book, whatever its strengths, illustrates the importance of this fundamental tenet in legal research. McCormick organizes his book into 12 chapters and arranges them in a fairly conventional manner. The opening three chapters set the stage for his discussion. He first introduces certain basic characteristics of Western law, such as abstraction, argument by analogy, and an emphasis of procedure. He then provides some baseline information about the numerous contacts citizens have with courts and attorneys and on how the Canadians view their legal system. In the third chapter, he sketches the outlines of how Canada's courts are organized. The chapter on citizen encounters with the legal system offers a crude approximation of the possible impact the courts have on society. Limited survey data indicate that, although Canadians generally trust their courts, they also believe minorities and the poor are treated unfairly. The chapter surveying the structure of the judicial system touches on the historical and constitutional foundations of Canada's courts. McCormick extends and deepens the book's focus in the next three chapters with more intensive analyses of trial courts, the provincial courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court. He draws on his previously published work for empirical data on the courts of appeal and Supreme Court in order to describe the dispositional patterns of these courts and how they handle cases; these chapters, particularly the one on the Supreme Court, tend to be dense with various and generally useful findings. With the seventh and eighth chapters, McCormick