Professor Emeritus Wilfrid Prest

Biography/ Background

Wilf Prest graduated BA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne, and wrote his DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford. After a brief foray into educational publishing in London, he joined the University of Adelaide's History Department as a lecturer in 1966.

Apart from two years as an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (1969-71), he remained a full-time member of the Adelaide department until July 2002, when he resigned his personal chair in order to take up an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship, which he held as a joint appointment in the School of Law and the School of History and Politics, for a research project on the life and works of the eighteenth-century English legal author William Blackstone (http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/historypolitics/conferences/blackstone/).

His full-length scholarly biography, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eigteenth Century will be published by Oxford University Press on 25 October 2008, to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Blackstone's 'general introductory lecture' as foundation Vinerian Professor of the Laws of England in the University of Oxford. Prest is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and an Honorary Fellow of Queen's College, University of Melbourne; from 1978-85 he chaired the Board of the Art Gallery of South Australia. He has held visiting posts at All Souls College, Oxford, Clare Hall, Cambridge, St Andrew's University, the Australian National University, Princeton University, the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and the University of Otago, Dunedin.

Research Interests

Research

Corruption, political and judicial, in early modern England

Law and society in early modern England

Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England : a variorum edition

The Middle Temple, London, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century

Select Publications

Books

1. William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. xvii + 355 pp., 22 illustrations
2. Albion Ascendant: English History 1660-1815 Short Oxford History of the Modern World, ed. J. M. Roberts. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1998; cloth and paperback editions. xx + 363 pp.
3. The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590-1640 Oxford Studies in Social History, ed. Keith Thomas. Oxford, Clarendon Press. 1986; rev. paperback edition, 1991. xvi + 442 pp.
4. The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590-1640 London, Longman. Totowa NJ, Rowman and Littlefield. 1972. xii + 263 pp.
Edited Books
1. The Letters of Sir William Blackstone London, Selden Society, Supplementary Series, vol. 14. 2006. xxxiii+194 pp.
2. Litigation Past and Present (with Sharyn Roach Anleu) Kensington, University of New South Wales Press. 2004. xiii + 209 pp.

Contributions to Books

1. 'Legal Autobiography in Early Modern England', in Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices ed. R. Bedford, L. Davies and P. Kelly. Ann Arbor. Universitt of Michigan Press, 2006, pp. 280-94
2. 'The experience of litigation in eighteenth-century England', in The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Lemmings. Woodbridge, Suffolk. Boydell and Brewer, 2005, pp. 133-54
3. 'Archer, Sir John (1598-1682)', 'Blackstone, Sir William (1723-1780)' and 25 other entries, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. C. Matthew and B. Harrison. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 60 vols. casebound, and electronic publication, 2004

Journal Articles

1. 'Reconstructing the Blackstone Archive: Or, Blundering after Blackstone', Archives, 31, October 2006, 108-118
2. 'The Religion of a Common Lawyer? William Blackstone's Anglicanism', Parergon, n.s. 23, July 2004, 153-68
3. 'Antipodean Blackstone: the Commentaries "Down Under"', Flinders University Journal of Law Reform, 6 (2003), 151-167
4. 'Blackstone as Architect: Constructing the Commentaries', Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 15 (2003), 103-133

Reviews of Scholarly Books

1. W. Pue and D. Sugarman, Lawyers and Vampires: Cultural Histories of Legal Professions (Hart Publishing), in Adelaide Law Review, 24.2 (2005 for 2003), 311-316
2. A.Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History: Volume Two: Democracy (Oxford University Press), in History Australia, 2:2 (June 2005), 055-1-3
3. P. Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660 (Cambridge University Press), in American Historical Review, 110 (2005), 860-861

http://www.law.adelaide.edu.au/research/srg/blackstone/

Entry last updated: Wednesday, 1 Oct 2008