New Book from Selden’s Sister scheduled for 2025

We have signed a contract with Hart Publishing for an edited collection including papers from our conference in Liverpool in September 2023. The event sought to celebrate the contributions of women to early legal historical scholarship, to commemorate the achievements of under-appreciated figures in legal history, and to assess their contributions in light of present understandings of the discipline.

This collection will be a novel contribution to the field of legal history, which is often thought of as a male-dominated discipline. It is a timely addition to legal-historical scholarship as legal history is today populated by a more diverse range of academics than has ever been the case, with many female scholars making important contributions to the field. The collection seeks to highlight the fact that women’s work in this discipline is nothing new: many women made important (though under-appreciated) legal-historical discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whilst the celebrated early contributors to legal history are men, such as John Selden, Frederic William Maitland, and (more recently) Toby Milsom, women are generally under-cited by comparison, even where they made substantial scholarly contributions. Furthermore, the contributions of women to legal history stretch beyond academic scholarship. In focusing on the work of women legal historians, and recognising the value of such work, this book addresses a longstanding imbalance in legal historical scholarship, laying the foundations for a transformational reassessment of the discipline.

The collection will be edited by Lorren Eldridge, Emily Ireland, and Caroline Derry. We cannot wait to share it with you next year!

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Selden’s Sister attend the British Legal History Conference 2024