Eric M. Adams & Jordan Stanger‑Ross

Eric M. Adams & Jordan Stanger‑Ross, Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution. UBC Press, 2025.

Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution, by Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger‑Ross is an exceptional scholarly contribution, interpretively sophisticated, and lucid in its writing. Drawing on extensive archival evidence and careful historical reconstruction, the authors investigate the Canadian state’s postwar effort to remove Japanese Canadians from the country, demonstrating how exclusionary exercises of power strained and exposed the limits of the wartime constitutional framework.

Bringing legal analysis into dialogue with political and social history, Challenging Exile offers a sustained examination of exile as a contested strategy of governance while centring the experiences of those who endured forced movement, material loss, and the threat of permanent expulsion. Its close study of judicial challenges before the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council deepens our understanding of how citizenship, rights, and constitutional authority were debated under conditions of profound democratic stress. Carefully argued and gracefully written, the book stands as a lasting and original contribution to Canadian political history and to wider conversations about state power, inclusion, and justice during periods of national insecurity.