The Law School and the Centre for Law and History Research hosted the 26th British Legal History Conference from 3rd to 6th July 2024. The conference organisers were Gwen Seabourne and Joanna McCunn. Read on to see some of their reflections on the experience.
GS: Now that we have had a bit of time to recover, and the dust has settled, it seems like a good chance to think about our time preparing for, and hosting, the BLHC. I came away feeling happy about it all, and glad that we did it. What about you?
JM: I’m really glad we did it too! There was definitely a lot of work involved behind the scenes – not just by us but by lots of our colleagues too. But it felt like it all paid off as soon as the conference delegates arrived and started enjoying the events we had planned for them. I was especially glad that we were able to show off some Bristolian highlights, even if the weather didn’t always co-operate…
GS: It felt to me like a good time to do this, both in personal terms, and also in terms of where legal history is as a discipline at the moment.
The personal aspect is that putting this thing on is an absolutely massive task. Fellow medieval legal historians (a really huge demographic …) will know what I mean when I say that hosting the BLHC is a little bit like having the general eyre visit your town (only without the hangings). The size of the undertaking means that, at earlier points in my career, when I ran the legal history unit at Bristol single-handed, and there were nothing like as many legal historians and legal history-friendly academics in the Law School as we now have, it would have been far too much to take on. Now, though, we are in a much stronger position, with several colleagues working in the area, our own research centre, and even a legal historian as Head of School. And, of course, it was great to do this with you. Thank goodness we get on well, trust each other’s instincts and were generally ‘on the same page’ in terms of what we wanted to do with the conference. Imagine if we’d had ‘artistic differences’ …!
JM: Haha, yes, I’m very glad that neither of us turned out to be a conference diva! And that we were able to keep a sense of humour about it all.
GS: The bigger picture, for me at least, was that legal history is in an interesting place generally. It is something that attracts scholars from a number of different academic backgrounds, and, although its ‘centre of gravity’ remains in law schools, it does feel as if it is opening up to, and welcoming the perspectives of, social and economic historians, literary scholars and others. I have always been keen on pushing the inter-disciplinary aspect of legal history, and this was a great chance to do that.