The ILHS Spring Discourse 2020 has been cancelled due to Covid-19
We hope to re-schedule later in the year.
Discourses
Winter Discourse 2019
Our 2019 Winter Discourse takes place this Friday 6 December. Professor Richard English will deliver a paper entitled Legacies of the Irish Revolution: Ernie O’Malley and the IRA.
The Discourse begins at 6 pm in the Upper Bar Library, Royal Courts of Justice. All welcome.
The Speaker
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, where he is also Distinguished Professorial Fellow in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. Professor English’s research focuses on the politics and history of nationalism, political violence, and terrorism, with a particular focus on Ireland and Britain. His books include Does Terrorism Work? A History (OUP, 2016), Modern War: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013), Terrorism: How to Respond (OUP, 2009), Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (Pan Macmillan, 2006), Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Pan Macmillan, 2003), Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual (OUP, 1998), and Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State 1925-1937 (OUP, 1994). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Fellow of Keble College Oxford, and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews. Professor English has given invited Lectures on his research in more than twenty countries. In 2018 he was awarded a CBE for services to the understanding of modern day terrorism and political history.
The Venue
Spring Discourse 2019
Judge Liz Goldthorpe delivered the 2019 Spring Discourse on the subject of Averil Deverell BL, the second woman called to the Bar of Ireland and the first to practice in the South. Deverell went down to the Law Library to practise in January 1922, and remained in practice until her retirement in 1969. She was among the first group of women graduates from Trinity College, University of Dublin, obtaining her law degree in 1915. She died in 1979 and in her will left a bequest setting up a lectureship in the Law School of Trinity College.
The Honourable Society of the King’s Inns holds an archive of Averil Deverill’s papers, details of which can be found here.
The Spring Discourse took place on Friday 22 February at the Law Society of Ireland, and was well-attended.
Autumn Discourse 2018
The 2018 Autumn Discourse was delivered by the Hon. Sir Donnell Deeny at the Graduates Memorial Building, Trinity College Dublin on Friday 23 November.
The title of the Presidential Address was:
“The Trials of Arthur Donnelly: A Cause Célèbre of the 1870s”
The Rt Hon Lord Justice Deeny is a Privy Councillor, as well as the Pro Chancellor of Dublin University. His paper was followed by lively discussion. Members of the Society were then invited to a reception hosted by the Provost, marking thirty years since the foundation of the Society in 1988.
Spring Discourse 2018
The 2018 Spring Discourse was delivered by Dr. Marion Röwekamp from the Freie Universität, Berlin. Marking 100 years since the right to vote was extended to women, Dr. Röwekamp’s lecture was entitled Women’s Suffrage in Germany and t
he United Kingdom.
Dr. Röwekamp’s publications include:
- Lawyers. Encyclopedia on life and work, ed. German Lawyers’ Association, Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden 2005.
- The first German lawyers: A history of their professionalization and emancipation 1900-1945 (Series Legal History and Gender Studies), Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2011.
- Marie Munk. Attorney at Law – Judge – Law Reformer (Series Jewish Miniatures), Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich,, 2014.
- A soldier’s home nurse on the eastern front. Correspondence from Annette Schücking with her family (1941-1943), ed. by Julia Paulus / Marion Röwekamp, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015.
- Sara Kimble / Marion Röwekamp (ed.), New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History (Studies in Gender and History series), New York / London: Routledge, 2016.
AGM and Winter Discourse 2017
The 2017 Annual General Meeting of the Irish Legal History Society was held on Friday 1st December 2017 at 5pm in the Old Bar Library, Royal Courts of Justice, Chichester Street, Belfast
The Winter Discourse was delivered by:
Professor Jane Ohlmeyer
PH.D, F.R.HIST.S., M.R.I.A., F.T.C.D., Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin:
Lords, the Law and Litigation in Early Modern Ireland
Biographical Note:
Professor Ohlmeyer is an expert on the New British and Atlantic Histories and has published extensively on early modern Irish and British history. She has recently completed Making Ireland English: the formation of an aristocracy in the seventeenth century for Yale University Press and volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Ireland is currently in the press. She is currently working on an edition of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, A shorte view of the State and condicon of the kingdome of Ireland/The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in Ireland (Dublin, 1719/20 and London, 1720 and 1721) and a study of ‘Colonial Ireland, Colonial India’. Professor Ohlmeyer is also an active proponent of ‘Digital Humanities’
Over the years Professor Ohlmeyer has attracted significant amounts of highly competitive funding for her own research projects and for her graduate students. She has considerable expertise in overseeing major editorial projects and helped to secure over €1M in funding from the IRCHSS, the AHRC (the UK funding council) and Trinity College for the digitization and online publication of the ‘1641 Depositions’. She is a founding member of the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity’s humanities research institute and serves its Internal and External Advisory Boards and in a related initiative – ‘Creativity, the City and the University’ – which is linked to the Dublin Creative Alliance. She was closely involved in setting up the ‘Humanities Serving Irish Society’ consortium which under PRTLI 4 secured funding for the Digital Humanities Observatory. She is also the Principal Investigator for the Trinity College Dublin element of ‘Humanities Serving Irish Society’ which was awarded €10.78M as part of PRTLI 4.
Select Publications
Books
- Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the seventeenth century, London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012, 1 – 680pp
- Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: the Political Career of Randal MacDonnell First Marquis of Antrim (1609-83) (Cambridge University Press, 1993; paperback reprint in Four Courts Press’s ‘Classics in Irish History’ Series, Dublin, 2001), xxiii + 357 pages.
- The Irish Statute Staple Books, 1596-1687 (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1998), with Éamonn Ó Ciardha, xvii + 380 pages.
- The 1641 Depositions – The online version is now available. Between 2011 and 2015 the Irish Manuscripts Commission will publish the 1641 Depositions in 12 volumes. Aidan Clarke is the principal editor and I am one of the co-editors, along with Tom Bartlett, John Morrill and Micheál Ó Siochrú.
- British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland editor with Ciaran Brady (Cambridge University Press, 2004; paperback 2010), xx + 371 pages.
- Kingdom or Colony?: Political Thought in seventeenth-century Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2000; paper back 2010), xvii + 290 pages.
- The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638-1660 (Oxford University Press, 1998; reprinted as part of the Oxford Illustrated History series, 2002), with John Kenyon, xl + 300 pages, 51 illustrations and 10 maps.
- Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback, 2002), li + 309 pages.
Articles
- ‘Making Ireland English: the seventeenth-century Irish peerage’ in Brian MacCuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland 1590-1700: Colonization and its consequences: Essays presented to Nicholas Canny (Dublin, 2011).
- ‘Society: the changing role of print – Ireland (to 1660)’ in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, volume I (Oxford, 2011).
- ‘The baronial context of the Civil War in Ireland’ in John Adamson (ed.), The Civil Wars (London, 2008), pp. 106-24.
- ‘Patronage and Restoration Politics: John Dryden and the House of Ormond’ (with Steven Zwicker) in Historical Journal (2006), pp. 677-706.
- ‘A Laboratory for Empire?: Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism’ in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 26-60.
- ‘Literature, Identity, and the New British Histories’ in David Barker and Willy Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 245-55.
- ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories’ in American Historical Review 104:2 (April, 1999), pp. 446-462
- ‘”Civilizinge of those rude partes”. The colonization of Ireland and Scotland, 1580s-1640s’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, ed. N. Canny (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 124-47.
- ‘The Wars of Religion, 1603-60’ in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 160-187.
- ‘The “Antrim Plot” of 1641 – a myth?’, The Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 905-19.
Spring Discourse 2017
Our 2017 Spring Discourse took place on Friday 17 February at 5.30, at Regent House, Trinity College Dublin. John F. Larkin, QC, Attorney General for Northern Ireland delivered an insightful address on: ‘The Irish Convention, 1917-18: Centenary Reflections’
About the Speaker
- John F
Larkin QC was educated at St Mary’s Christian Brothers Grammar School and at Queen’s University Belfast. - He was called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in Michaelmas Term 1986 and later to the Bar of Ireland.
- Between 1989 and 1991 he was Reid Professor of Criminal Law in Trinity College Dublin.
- He took silk in Michaelmas term 2001. In the last ten years his practice has been mainly in Constitutional and Administrative Law and Human Rights.
Following the transfer of policing and criminal justice powers to Northern Ireland he was appointed Attorney General for Northern Ireland on 24 May 2010. He is the first person to hold the office separately since its functions were assumed by the Attorney General for England and Wales in 1972.
Podcasts: Law and the Idea of Liberty in Ireland
The Irish Legal History Society marked the 800th anniversary of the transmission of Magna Carta to Ireland with a two-day conference in Christ Church Cathedral in November 2016. The conference explored the legal-historical background to Magna Carta in Ireland, the reception of the charter into English law in Ireland, the political and polemical uses to which the charter was put, and its twentieth and twentieth-first century invocations as a living presence in contemporary Irish law. Professor Paul Brand (All Souls, Oxford) delivered a keynote address on the impact of Magna Carta on the development of English law in medieval Ireland.
Speakers included: Claire Breay, Sean Duffy, Ian Campbell, Coleman Dennehy, Sparky Booker, Colum Kenny, Adrian Empey, James Kelly, Patrick Geoghegan, John Larkin, Bláthna Ruane.
The conference was recorded for podcasting by Real Smart Media, and is available here:
Presidential Discourse 2015
On 27 November outgoing President of the Society, Mr Robert Marshall, delivered his pres
idential discourse. His paper, entitled ‘Lisnafanna: A Townland in Turmoil on the Cavan Headford Estate 1870-1900’, was based on a close study of the Headford estate papers. The paper provided some fascinating insights into the existence and operation of subversive or subaltern law on a Cavan estate in the late nineteenth century. It looked specifically at the National League’s boycotting campaign and how this operated at a local and personal level. Interestingly, even on an estate where the Plan was in place, roughly two thirds of rent was still paid.
Mr Marshall went on to consider the legal procedures and processes which followed the fatal shooting of one of the boycotters. The coroner’s inquest saw the apportionment of some blame to the constabulary. Although a verdict of murder was returned by the coroner’s jury, the grand jury, by contrast, found ‘no true bill’, and the case did not proceed to trial.
All of this illustrates the role of the community in policing and sanctioning certain behaviours, and it the paper also explored the complex relationship between the ‘official’ law and the subaltern code.
A full text of the paper will be published in one of the Society’s upcoming collections of essays.
Professor Ian MacBride on the Penal Laws
The Society was delighted to host Professor Ian MacBride from King’s College London for the 2015 Spring Discourse. Professor MacBride’s paper, ‘Why the history of the penal laws has still to be written’ was a thought-provoking analysis of the reasons surrounding the relative dearth of scholarship surrounding the penal laws. The discourse took place at the UCD Sutherland School of Law and was well-attended by members of the Society and others.