Professor Ian Williams

I am a lawyer and legal historian whose interests range widely.

I joined St John’s from at the Faculty of Laws, UCL, which was preceded by a period as a college teaching officer and affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where I also completed my doctorate.

I am the editor of the Journal of Legal History and very happy to discuss the publication process with early career scholars.

Teaching

I teach all years in the undergraduate course, offering tutorials in a Roman Introduction to Private Law, Land Law and Trusts. I also teach in the third year optional module on the History of English Law, as well as taught graduate modules in Law and Society in Medieval England and Modern Legal History.

I am very happy to supervise graduate students working in legal history, particularly English legal history.

My research interests are principally in English legal history, although I have made occasional forays into modern property law.

I have published on topics from the late-twelfth century to the seventeenth, but my focus is on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My work mostly clusters around two inter-related interests. First the interaction between legal practice, more theoretical ideas of law and other sources of normative ideas (such as other legal systems or theology). Second, the communication of law, principally within the legal profession through legal education and printed and manuscript texts. These fields encourage me to range widely in my research, from the history of the crime of larceny, through the final cases in which a king of England sat as a judge in court, to explaining why law books gradually changed to be printed in English.

My current research project is on the court of Star Chamber, which brings these interests together. I am finalising an edition of law reports from early in the reign of Charles I which circulated widely amongst lawyers at the time. I am also working on the early-modern idea of the Star Chamber as a court which provided criminal equity and how that idea shaped the court’s work.

Publications

‘Star Chamber and the Civil Law’ in Sampson and Tofaris, Essays in Law and History for David Ibbetson (2024)

‘Learning the “New Law” of Star Chamber: Legal Education and Legal Literature in Early-Stuart England’ Journal of Legal History (2022)

‘James VI and I, rex et iudex: One King as Judge in Two Kingdoms’ in Eves, Hudson, Ivarsen and White (eds.), Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law: Essays in Comparative Legal History from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries (2021)

‘Contemporary Knowledge of the Star Chamber and the Abolition of the Court’ in Kesselring and Mears, Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records (2021)

Networks and Connections in Legal History (with Michael Lobban) (2020)

‘Law, Language and the Printing Press in the Reign of Charles I: Explaining the Printing of the Common Law in English’ Law and History Review (2020).

Awards and Distinctions

Editor, The Journal of Legal History

Council member, Selden Society

David Yale prize for ‘an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales’ (2015)

Francis Bacon Foundation Fellow, Huntington Library, California (2006)