In Summary

  • Another milestone for Swinburne Law School
  • Legal History’s editors have a strong track record
  • Journal promotes legal history in context of law today

Swinburne Law School is pleased to announce that it is the new institutional host of the long-running and respected Australian academic journal Legal History. Following a call for papers earlier this year, the inaugural issue of the revived series will be launched in August 2016.

“Legal History is devoted to the history of the law and legal institutions in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, and more broadly of the common law world. The journal promotes legal history as being vital to understanding the context and meaning of law today and to informing future directions,” says joint editor, Dr Amanda Scardamaglia.

“The journal is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing and will feature peer-reviewed contributions from all jurisdictions, especially those with an interdisciplinary, transnational or comparative character. It will also call attention to memoirs and book reviews.”

The re-launch is another milestone for the Swinburne Law School which is in its second year, having been officially launched in February 2015, with Professor Dan Hunter appointed as Foundation Dean.

Dr Scardamaglia will edit the journal with Dr Jessica Lake. Both editors have an interest in legal history and have a strong track record of publishing in the field.

Dr Scardamaglia is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Department Chair at Swinburne Law School. Her area of research and expertise is intellectual property law, especially trade mark law and its history. She is currently a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellow and author of the book: Australian Colonial Trade Mark Law: Narratives in Lawmaking, People and Place.

Dr Lake is a Lecturer at Swinburne Law School. She researches in the areas of privacy law, American legal history, and law and gender. Her book, on the origins of US privacy law, titled The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits, will be published by Yale University Press in November this year. In 2016-2017, Dr Lake will be the Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College (USA).

To make a submission or to learn more about Legal History, please contact the editors.The journal is accepting submissions on a continuing basis.

Media enquiries

0455 502 999
media@swinburne.edu.au