Raw Life: Cameos of 1890s Justice from a Magistrate's Bench Book

While dispensing speedy justice, Boyer, who was also town clerk and editor of the Northern Advocate, the first newspaper in Ontario's northern districts, kept a careful record in his handwritten "bench book" of all these cases. That bench book, recently found by his great-grandson, lawyer J. Patrick Boyer, provides the raw material for Raw Life.

This first-time publication of the these cases demonstrates how, in Canadian society, some things haven't changed much over the years -- from early road rage to the plight of abused women, from environmental contamination to punitive treatment of the poor.