Dr Emily Ireland, University of Liverpool will give a seminar on 'Conceptualising Legal Personhood in Eighteenth-Centry England'.
Legal personhood is a concept that has proved slippery and changeable over time. Whilst the eighteenth century saw increasing popularity of the idea that every English citizen was entitled to complete equality under the rule of law, many scholars have shown how the law affected distinct groups of society differently. Legal status, and thus legal personhood, was not a ‘one-size fits all’ concept. It was, in fact, a concept that did as much to situate individuals outside of the law as it did to place them within it. Accessing and utilising the law was easier for some English subjects than others.
This paper examines the legal status of individuals under English common law during the period 1689-1760, paying particular attention to those whose legal status was modified in some way, for example married women, children, enslaved people, those of non-Christian faiths, and the mentally unwell. This paper employs comparative and intersectional analysis to find differences and similarities in the laws that regulated the status of subordinated members of society in eighteenth-century England. By moving away from traditional, doctrinal legal histories that present eighteenth-century English law as a set of rules that impacted each citizen uniformly, this paper develops an overarching theory of eighteenth-century legal personhood that reflects the differences in doctrine for different members of society.
Biography
Dr Emily Ireland was appointed Lecturer in Law at the School of Law and Social Justice in June 2021. Prior to this, she completed her LLB in Law and Criminology at the University of Manchester in 2015, an LLM in Law at University College London in 2016, and a PhD in Law at the University of Adelaide in 2020. Emily’s research interests are in legal history, particularly socio-legal and feminist histories of the criminal law, equity, and family law. She is interested in how subordinated peoples have negotiated the law over time. Her work to date has examined the relationship of gender and the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Emily is the author of a growing number of publications on eighteenth and nineteenth-century women and the law, including ‘Rebutting the Presumption: Rethinking the Common Law Principle of Marital Coercion in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century England’ (Journal of Legal History, 2019) and 'Re-examining the Presumption: Coverture and 'Legal Impossibilities' in Early Modern English Criminal Law' (Journal of Legal History, 2022). She has also conducted research and contributed to reports for the South Australian Law Reform Institute. As part of her commitment to expanding the reach and inclusivity of legal history, Emily is co-director of Selden's Sister, a network for women in legal history, and the Northern Legal History Group, a research initiative based in the North West of England.