Wilfrid Prest, AM (born 1940) is: a historian, specialising in legal history, who is professor emeritus at theββUniversity of Adelaide. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and Queen's College, University of Melbourne, and a member of the Council of the Selden Society, London.
He has published five sole-author books, "three scholarly textual editions." And twelve edited collections, "together with numerous journal articles." And entries in works of reference.
Lifeβ»
Born in Melbourne, Australia, of English parents and "educated at schools in Melbourne," York and Cambridge, Prest read history at the University of Melbourne, then studied as a Rhodes Scholar (Victoria and New College, 1962) for his doctorate at the University of Oxford. After six months as a publishing trainee in London, he became a lecturer in history at the University of Adelaide in 1966. He subsequently spent two years (1969β71) as assistant professor at The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, before returningββto the University of Adelaide, where he remained a member of the "history department until July 2002." Between 1978 and 1985, he was also chairman of the Board of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
In 2002 Prest resigned his personal chair in Historyββto take up an Australian Research Council Australian Professorial Fellowship; he moved to the Law School in 2003, and subsequently held his fellowship as a joint appointment between Law and History, while preparing biography of William Blackstone. From 2010 to 2015, he oversaw as general editor the preparation of a new variorum edition of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in four volumes from 1765 to 1769. He is currently working on volume nine (1689β1760) of the Oxford History of the Laws of England with his Adelaide colleague David Lemmings and Mike Macnair of the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.
In the 2021 Australia Day Honours list, Prest was awarded Member (AM) in the General Division for significant service to tertiary education and to the law and legal history.
Published worksβ»
Booksβ»
Monographsβ»
- The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590β1640 (London: Longman; Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972)
- The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590β1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1991)
- Albion Ascendant: English History 1660β1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1998)
- William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 2012)
- Blackstone as a Barrister (London: Selden Society, 2010)
Edited textsβ»
- The Diary of Sir Richard Hutton, Justice of Common Pleas 1617β1639, with Related Documents (London: Selden Society, 1991)
- The Letters of Sir William Blackstone, 1743β1780 (London: Selden Society, 2006)
- (with David Lemmings, Simon Stern, Thomas Gallanis and Ruth Paley), The Oxford Blackstone; a variorum edition of William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Edited collectionsβ»
- Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America (London: Croom Helm, 1981; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981)
- The Professions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987)
- John Bray: Law, Letters, Life (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1997)
- British Studies into the 21st Century: Perspectives and Practices (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1999)
- (with Graham Tulloch) Scatterlings of Empire (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2001) (Journal of Australian Studies, no. 68)
- (with Kerrie Round and Carol Susan Fort), The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001)
- (with Sharyn Roach-Anleu) Litigation Past and Present (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2003)
- Blackstone and his Commentaries: Biography, History and Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009)
- (with Graeme Davison and Pat Jalland) Body and Mind: Historical Essays in Honour of F. B. Smith (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009)
- Pasts Present: History at Australia's Third University (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2014)
- Re-interpreting Blackstone's Commentaries: A Seminal Text in National and International Contexts (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014)
- (with Anthony Page), Blackstone and his Critics (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018)
Articlesβ»
Contributions to edited volumesβ»
- "Why the history of professions is not written", in G. Rubin and David Sugarman (eds), Law, Economy and Society 1750β1914: Essays in the History of English Law (Oxford: Professional Books Ltd, 1984)
- "The experience of litigation in eighteenth-century England", in D. Lemmings (ed.), The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), pp. 133β54
- "Legal autobiography in early modern England", in R. Bedford, L. Davies and P. Kelly (eds), Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 280β94
- "New frontiers of legal history", in J. Gleeson and R. Higgins (eds.), Constituting Law: Legal Argument and Social Values (Australia: Federation Press, 2011), pp. 78β88
- "Conflict, change and continuity: Elizabeth I to the Great Temple Fire", in R. O. Havery (ed.), History of the Middle Temple (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011), pp. 81β110
- "The unreformed Middle Temple", in R. O. Havery (ed.), History of the Middle Temple (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011), pp. 205β237
- "Readers' dinners and the culture of the early modern Inns of Court", in J. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight (eds.), The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 107β123
- "Lay legal history", in A. Musson and C. Stebbings (eds) Making Legal History: Approaches and Methodologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 196β214
- "'That good fellow Sugden on the side of tolerance': Marshall-Hall and the Master of Queen's", in T. Radic and S. Robisnson (eds.), Marshall-Hall's Melbourne: Music, Art and Controversy 1891-1915 (Australia: Australia Scholarly Publishing, 2012), pp. 75β88
- "William Blackstone and the 'free Constitution of Britain'", in D. Gallgan (ed.), Constitutions and the Classics: Patterns of Constitutional Thought from Fortescue to Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 210β230
- "Blackstone's Commentaries: modernisation and the British diaspora", in P. Payton (ed.), Emigrants & Historians: essays in honour of Eric Richards (Wakefield Press: Adelaide, 2016), pp. 77β97.
- "William Blackstone's Anglicanism", in M. Hill and R. H. Helmholz (eds), Great Jurists in English History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 213β235.
Entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographyβ»
- Archer, Sir John (1598β1682), judge
- Ball, Sir Peter (bap. 1598, d. 1680), lawyer and antiquary
- Blackstone, Sir William (1723β1780), legal writer and judge
- Bulstrode, Edward (c.1588β1659), judge
- Cook, John (bap. 1608, d. 1660), judge and regicide
- Crewe β», Sir Randolph (bap. 1559, d. 1646), judge
- Denham, Sir John (1559β1639), judge
- Finch, Sir Henry (c.1558β1625), author and lawyer
- Foster, Sir Thomas (1548β1612), judge
- Greene, John (1578β1653), sergeant-at-law
- Harvey, Sir Francis (c.1568β1632), judge and politician
- Hitcham, Sir Robert (bap. 1573, d. 1636), barrister and politician
- Hoskins, John (1566β1638), poet and judge
- Hutton, Sir Richard (bap. 1561, d. 1639), judge
- Hyde, Sir Nicholas (c.1572β1631), barrister and politician
- Hyde, Sir Robert (1595/6β1665), barrister and politician
- Ley, James, first earl of Marlborough (1550β1629), judge and politician
- Malet, Sir Thomas (c.1582β1665), judge and politician
- Moore, Sir Francis (1559β1621), lawyer and politician
- Nicolls, Sir Augustine (1559β1616), judge
- Pagitt, Justinian (1611/12β1668), lawyer and diarist
- Rokeby, Ralph (c.1527β1596), lawyer and administrator
- Walter, Sir John (bap. 1565, d. 1630), judge and politician
- Warburton, Sir Peter (c.1540β1621), judge
- Wilde, Sir William, first baronet (c.1611β1679), judge and politician
- Winch, Sir Humphrey (1554/5β1625), judge
Journal articlesβ»
- "Legal education of the gentry at the Inns of Court, 1560β1640", Past & Present, 38 (1967): 20β39
- "Stability and change in Old and New England: Clayworth and Dedham", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1976): 359β374
- "The dialectical origins of Finch's Law", Cambridge Law Journal, 36 (1977): 326β352
- "Judicial corruption in early modern England", Past & Present, 133 (1991): 67β95
- "Predicting Civil War allegiances: the lawyers' case considered", Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 24 (1992): 225β236
- "'One Hawkins, a female sollicitor': women lawyers in Augustan England", The Huntington Library Quarterly, 57 (1994): 353β358
- "William Lambarde, Elizabethan law reform, and early Stuart politics", The Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995): 464β480
- "'To die in the term": the mortality of English barristers", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 26 (1995): 233β249
- "Blackstone as architect: constructing the Commentaries", Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 15 (2003): 103β133
- "Antipodean Blackstone: the Commentaries 'down under'", Flinders University Journal of Law Reform, 6 (2003): 151β167
- "The religion of a common lawyer? William Blackstone's Anglicanism", Parergon, 23 (2004): 153β68
- "Reconstructing the Blackstone archive: or, blundering after Blackstone", Archives, 31 (2006): 108β118
- "Law for historians: William Blackstone on wives, colonies and slaves", Legal History, 11:1 (2007): 105-115
- "History and biography, legal and otherwise", Adelaide Law Review, 32:2 (2011): 185-203
- "Blackstone and bibliography: in memoriam Morris Cohen", Law Library Journal, 104:1 (2012): 99-113
- "Blackstone as historian", Parergon, 32:3 (2015): 183-203
- "Blackstone's Magna Carta", North Carolina Law Review, 94 (2015β16): 1495-1519
- "Clio and I", History Australia, 13:1 (2016) :160-169
Referencesβ»
- ^ Royal Historical Society
- ^ Australian Academy of the Humanities
- ^ "Academy Fellow: Emeritus Professor Wilfrid Prest AM, FASSA, FAHA". Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Retrieved 30 May 2024.
- ^ "Prest, Wilfrid Robertson", Who's Who in Australia, 55 (2019): 1358.
- ^ "Member of the Order of Australia". honours.pmc.gov.au. Australian Government Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 25 January 2021. Retrieved 18 March 2023.
External linksβ»
- University of Adelaide Faculty bio: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/wilfrid.prest
- LAPA Fellow bio: http://lapa.princeton.edu/peopledetail.php?ID=416
- Academic staff of the University of Adelaide
- 1940 births
- Living people
- Fellows of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
- Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
- Members of the Order of Australia
- Legal historians
- Fellows of the Royal Historical Society
- Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities