W. P. M. Kennedy

William Paul McClure Kennedy (January 8, 1879 – August 12, 1963) was a Canadian historian and legal scholar.

[1] Kennedy advised the attorney-general and a parliamentary committee on potential revisions to the British North America Act.

[2] Kennedy's early constitutional scholarship argued against the concept of the nation state as applied in the Canadian context.

He followed the views of Lord Acton, who stressed that states formed on the basis of national self-determination put liberty at risk.

Instead, he argued in favour of what Carl Berger calls "relative autonomy" for Canada, then a dominion, within the broader British Empire.