Richard Charles Bosworth (Dick) Risk: Maker of Canadian legal history

Dick Risk was not just a leading scholar in the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, he was the founder of modern legal history in anglophone Canada. Before he began to research and write about the subject, the work that had been done in the area was ‘in equal measure antiquarian, descriptive and hagiographic.’ This article highlights two articles by Dick which are exemplars of his work. One, on the origins of workers’ compensation in Ontario, combined substantial empirical work on the operation of the law with an appreciation of the profound change in Canadian legal thought that the turn to an administrative agency rather than the courts and the common law represented. The other uncovered a little-known legal scholar of the 1920s and 1930s, WPM Kennedy, and the unique law school that he founded.