Date Published:
August 2004

Biographies of Prominent Quebec and Canadian

Historical Figures

Augustus Henry Frazer Lefroy

(1852-1919)

Damien-Claude Bélanger,

Department of History,

McGill University .

Jurist, was born at Toronto. He was educated at Rugby and at New College, Oxford. Born into a prominent Toronto family, Lefroy was called to the English Bar in 1877 and to the Ontario Bar the following year (K.C., 1908). He practiced law in Toronto during the 1880s and 1890s and was appointed professor of Roman law, jurisprudence, and the history of English law at the University of Toronto in 1900, a position he would hold until his death in 1919. Canada's leading late nineteenth and early twentieth century expert on the common law, he was the editor of the Canadian Law Times from 1915 until his death. Inspired in part by the work of Sir John George Bourinot, A. H. F. Lefroy's essays frequently emphasized the superiority of British and Canadian forms of government over American ones. An ardent imperialist, he sought to refute English jurist Albert Venn Dicey's assertion that the Canadian Constitution was essentially similar to the American one.