Monthly Archives: April 2017

ILCR Annual Lecture

The ILCR Annual Lecture will take place this Thursday (27 April) at 5pm in Parliament Hall.  It will be given by Professor William Ian Miller, Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and is entitled:
 ‘Food (Sticky and Fast) and Ties that Bind’
Bill Miller has been a member of the Michigan Law faculty since 1984. His research centers on saga Iceland, from whence the materials studied in his course Bloodfeuds and which provides the sources for his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (1990). He also has written about emotions, mostly unpleasant ones involving self-assessment, and select vices and virtues. Thus his books: Humiliation (1993); The Anatomy of Disgust (1997)—named the best book of 1997 in anthropology/sociology by the Association of American Publishers; The Mystery of Courage (2000); Faking It (2003), which deals with anxieties of role, identity, and posturings of authenticity; and Losing It (2011), where he turns a jaundiced eye toward aging and decline. The Chicago Tribune named Losing It to its list of best books of the year; Macleans magazine of Canada also listed it in its top 10 nonfiction books of 2011. Eye for an Eye (2006) is an extended treatment of the law of the talion. Audun and the Polar Bear: Luck, Law, and Largesse in a Medieval Tale of Risky Business (2008) offers an expansive interpretation of a superbly crafted short Icelandic tale. “Why is your axe bloody:” A Reading of Njáls Saga is exactly what the subtitle indicates; yet another book on a saga, Hrafnkel or the Ambiguities: Hard Cases, Hard Choices, will appear in 2017. He earned his BA from the University of Wisconsin and received both a PhD in English and a JD from Yale. He also has been a visiting professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Bergen, the University of Tel Aviv, and Harvard, and in 2008, was the Carnegie Centenary Trust Professor at the University of St. Andrews, where he is now also an honorary professor of history.https://www.law.umich.edu/FacultyBio/Pages/FacultyBio.aspx?FacID=wimiller

Professor John Hudson Receives Teaching Award

ILCR Director Professor John Hudson has received the 2017 St Andrews Students’ Association Teaching Award in the ‘Excellence as a Dissertation/Project Supervisor’ category. Professor Hudson currently supervises several ILCR PhD students and has guided many PhD projects and Mlitt dissertations to completion during his time at St Andrews. He was nominated for this award by a number of current and former students.

More details of the 2017 Teaching Excellence Awards are available here.

Professor Hudson (middle, far left) receives 2017 Teaching Award from University Principal Professor Sally Mapstone (front).

Professor Thomas Gallanis Lecture and Masterclass

The ILCR is pleased to welcome Professor Thomas Gallanis (Associate Dean for Research, Allan D. Vestal Chair in Law and Professor of History at the University of Iowa) as a senior visiting fellow. Professor Gallanis will give the following lecture and masterclass:
Lecture: Thurs, 20 April, 1-2pm, Old Class Library, Dept. of Medieval History, 69-71 South Street (lunch will now be available in Professor John Hudson’s office in the Department of Medieval History at 12.30)
“What Happened to English Constitutional History?”
Masterclass: Fri 21 April, 2-4pm, Old Seminar Room, Dept. of Medieval History, 69-71 South Street
“Bloody Code, Bloody Historians” Recommended advance reading is available here and here.

‘Law and Literature’ Lecture

The Annual ILCR ‘Law and Literature’ Lecture will take place on Monday 17 April, at 5.15pm in Parliament Hall.

‘Thomas Hobbes and the Norman Conquest’ Professor George Garnett, (University of Oxford) 

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

Professor Garnett is a medievalist with interests ranging well into the early modern period. He has published a large study of the impact of the Norman Conquest on notions of kingship, succession, and tenure; a briefer introduction to the Conquest; and several essays on these and related themes. He also works on political thought in a more conventional sense: he has published an edition of Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, the highly influential sixteenth-century Huguenot resistance treatise, and a study of the role of providential history in the thought of the fourteenth-century Italian theorist and anti-papal publicist, Marsilius of Padua.