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Biography
Dr Sarah White is Assistant Professor in the Law of Trusts and Co-Director of the History of Law and Governance Centre.
Sarah arrived at the University of Nottingham in 2023. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer in Medieval History at Lancaster University from 2021-2023 and a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews' Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research from 2017-2021, working on the European Research Council funded comparative legal history project: 'Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law: Consonance, Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the Late Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries'.
Sarah has a background in medieval legal history, researching the development of court procedure, the legal profession, and the interaction between law and religion.
Sarah obtained a BA Hons. (with Distinction) in Medieval Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada), followed by an MA (with Distinction) at the Centre for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. She then undertook a PhD in legal history at the University of St Andrews, focusing on the development of court procedure and legal argument in the thirteenth-century ecclesiastical Court of Canterbury. Sarah also holds a diploma in manuscript studies from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto), with a focus on diplomatics and textual editing (funded by a Mellon Fellowship).
Expertise Summary
Sarah's main teaching and research interests combine law, history, and religion, particularly as pertains to the historical development of English ecclesiastical law, Common Law, and the courts of equity in the medieval period. She also teaches modern law modules, particularly Trusts Law.
Research Summary
Broadly, Sarah's research looks at the intersection of law and religion through the works of the canon (ecclesiastical) lawyers of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. Her upcoming research is an… read more
Recent Publications
SARAH B. WHITE, 2024. The Medieval Antecedents: Pre-Reformation Canon Law. In: NORMAN DOE and STEPHEN COLEMAN, eds., The Legal History of the Church of England: From the Reformation to the Present Hart. 5-26
SARAH B. WHITE, 2022. Legal Arguments and Citations in the 13th-Century Court of Canterbury. In: FLORENCE DEMOULIN-AUZARY, NICHOLAS LAURENT-BONNE and FRANCK ROUMY, eds., Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law: Paris, 17-23 July 2016 16. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana. 585-600
Current Research
Broadly, Sarah's research looks at the intersection of law and religion through the works of the canon (ecclesiastical) lawyers of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. Her upcoming research is an interdisciplinary project examining the school of the Anglo-Norman canonists to bring a new perspective to the church/state debate, exploring how interconnected different legal traditions were in solving disputes on local to international levels. She has also published on various aspects of court procedure and litigation and has a forthcoming volume on medieval wills (along with related articles on the development of trusts, uses, and probate jurisdiction).