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Canadian Constitutional Conventions: The Marriage of Law and Politics , Andrew Heard, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991, 189 pp. - Reasoning with the Charter , Leon E. Trakman, Toronto: Butterworths, 1991, 219 pp.

Writings on constitutional matters in Canada has blossomed since the 1981-82 reinvigoration of the Canadian Constitution by the Constitution Act, 1982 and, in particular, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Singleand multipleauthor books and articles abound—witness the veritable explosion of historical, comparative, sociological, jurisprudential, and other analysis and re-analysis of subtle and not so subtle points of constitutional law. The two books that are the subject of this review are positive contributions to that explosion of analysis, but represent different poles in a continuum ranging from the practical nuts-and-bolts analysis to the pure theoretical. In Canadian Constitutional Conventions: The Marriage of Law and Politics, Andrew Heard, a political scientist, tackles what to many constitutional lawyers is the ethereal world of the informal rules of the Constitution known as conventions and usages. The first and last chapters are the keys to Heard's view of these informal constitutional rules. In between are five chapters detailing the existence and application of conventions and usages in relation to the executive, the legislatures, and the judiciary. The first chapter, aptly entitled "The Role and Nature of Conventions," establishes Heard's command of the literature by stalwartly reviewing the contradictory opinions of writers on the justiciability, or not, of conventions in light of their fundamental significance to the workings of the Constitution and the adjudication of specific constitutional disputes. Three sub-issues focus the analysis: how are conventions established, how are conventions identified, and what is the legal character of conventions? For Heard, arguments against the justiciability of conventions are