[We have the following announcement from the Selden Society. DRE]
David Yale Prize
Instituted in 1998, this biennial prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales from scholars who have been engaged in research in the subject for not longer than about ten years. Since 2017, separate prizes have been given for the best book and the best article published in the preceding two years. The prize is named in honour of Mr David Yale, QC, FBA, then President of the Society and formerly Literary Director.
The 2019 David Yale Book prize was awarded to Elizabeth Papp Kamali for Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The prize committee said of this work:
The committee also recommended that an honourable mention be given to Thomas J. McSweeney for his book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals (Oxford University Press, 2019)Papp-Kamali’s Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England is a wide-ranging and deeply researched contribution to the history of criminal law. In seeking to understand what ‘felony’ meant in medieval England, Papp-Kamali takes on a question which Maitland considered unanswerable. This book changes our existing understanding, using a challenging methodology which uses a much wider range of sources than is often the case in legal history scholarship. In doing so she places legal history within the history of wider cultural norms and influences to produce perceptive and valuable conclusions.
The 2019 David Yale article prize was awarded to Ciara Kennefick for ‘‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ in the Journal of Legal History 39 (2018), pp. 307-339. The prize committee said of this article:
Kennefick’s ‘The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867’ is a genuinely novel re-examination of an important part of English legal history, highlighting the interaction between questions of law about contractual fairness, and mathematics. Interest in legal questions drove interest in the study of probability, while developments in the mathematics of probability came to resolve legal questions. The article changes the way we look at the history of this area of law.