Legal History and Empires

The conference ‘Legal History and Empires: Perspectives from the Colonised’ was held at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, in Barbados from July 11 to 13, 2018. The conference is jointly sponsored by the Faculty of Law and Faculty of Humanities and Education of The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, and an international group of legal historians and historians of the law.

The Keynote Speaker was Dr. Maya Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History, Harvard University. A number of members of the Irish Legal History Society presented papers at the conference.

This conference followed the successful conference on the Legal Histories of the British Empire held at the National University of Singapore in 2012, and is similarly designed to bring together senior and emerging scholars working in the fields of imperial and colonial legal history.

Conference website: http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/Law/legal-history/home.aspx

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.

History of Law and the Family in Ireland

Niamh Howlin and Kevin Costello (eds), Law and the Family in Ireland 1800-1950 (Palgrave 2017)

Recently published by Palgrave as part of their Modern Legal History series.

This multi-disciplinary study considers the intersection between law and family life in Ireland from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Setting the law in its wider social historical context it traces marriage from its formation through to its breakdown. It considers the impact of the law on such issues as adultery, divorce, broken engagements, marriage settlements, pregnancy, adoption, property, domestic violence, concealment of birth and inter-family homicide, as well as the historical origins of the Constitutional protection of the family. An underlying theme is the way in which the law of the family in Ireland differed from the law of the family in England.

With contributions by Maebh Harding, Karen Brennan, Mary O’Dowd,  Diane Urquhart, Thomas Mohr, Deirdre McGowan, Michael Sinnott, Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Elaine Farrell, Simone McCoughran and Fred Powell.