W.N. Osborough Composition Prize in Legal History
The Irish Legal History Society awards the W.N. Osborough Composition Prize in Legal History. The purpose of this prize is to encourage and promote high-quality research in Irish legal history.
This prize is awarded to a member of the Irish Legal History Society who has written a composition that is deemed to have made a significant contribution to the field of Irish Legal History. The winner receives a commemorative framed parchment and €500.
The prize is named after Professor W.N. Osborough in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Irish Legal History. Professor Osborough is regarded as a leading Irish legal historian, and was a founding member of the Irish Legal History Society in 1988, and served as President from 2000 until 2003. He continued as an active member of the Society until his retirement from Council in 2010. Professor Osborough is the author of Law and the Emergence of Modern Dublin: A Litigation Topography for a Capital City (1996); Studies in Irish Legal History (1999); Literature, Judges and the Law (2008), and Borstal in Ireland: Custodial Provision for the Young Adult Offender, 1906-1974 (1975). He has edited several essay collections, and published numerous articles and essays dealing with a variety of areas of Irish legal history, including legal publishing, legal bibliography, sources of Irish legal history, constitutional history, canon law, the popery acts, administrative history, Catholics and the law, law and literature, law and literacy, property disputes, the history of the legal profession and Brehon laws. He served as editor of the Irish Jurist. Professor Osborough taught at Queen’s University Belfast, and was Dean of the Faculty of Law at both Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, where he continued as Emeritus Professor in the School of Law, until his passing in December 2020.
Rules
Rules of the W.N. Osborough Composition Prize in Legal History can be viewed here.
Past Recipients of the Prize
The 2017 Osborough Prize was awarded to solicitor and recent UCD graduate Mr Michael Sinnott for his article “The Appellate Jurisdiction of the Houses of Lords of Ireland and Great Britain: Chief Baron Jeffrey Gilbert’s Role in the Annesley v Sherlock Affair”, published in volume 16 of the University College Dublin Law Review.
In 2013 the Society presented the W.N. Osborough Composition Prize in Irish Legal History to Dr Maebh Harding, a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, for her article ‘The Curious Incident of the Marriag
e Act (No.2) 1537 and the Irish Statute Book’.
Dr Harding graduated from UCD in 2005 with a BCL (Law with French Law) and in 2008 completed a PhD thesis in UCD, entitled ‘The Legal Definition of Marriage in Ireland in the 21st Century: A Comparative analysis of Common Law and Civil Law’.’