Sarah is a Senior Lecturer in Law at York Law School, University of York, UK. After reading Law at Cardiff Law School she commenced studies in Modern British History gaining a MA (History) and PhD (History) before taking up a number of posts in UK Law Schools. Sarah’s 2014 monograph The Origins of Modern Financial Crime: Historical foundations and current problems in Britain whilst a study of Financial Crime also sought to promote greater utilization of history and historical methodology for legal research and teaching. In respect of the latter, Sarah has presented widely on encouraging legal academics to reflect on the value of historical approaches for legal education and pedagogy, across specific Legal Education conferences (including Directions in Legal Education; the UNSW-based Legal Education Research Conference; and the Australasian Law Academics Association Conference), and on the conference circuit more widely (including Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference, and Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society Conferences).
Teaching Law and History through a Gobal Pandemic: Reflections on 2020 -2022 “Pandemic Teaching” as Reflections on “Teaching Law in Times of Crisis”
Abstract:
This paper is grounded in the dedicated ‘Law and History’ module offered to undergraduate finalist Law students at the University of York. It illuminates firstly the aspirations and intendment behind the module, together with long-term experiences of delivery, and then talks through experiences of running the module whilst in the grips of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
At the heart of both longer-term approaches and the significance attached to enforced Covid-19 restriction adjustments is the module’s interest in exploring law today and its relationships with society and social change. For this, the module has always sought to combine wisdom from conventional Legal History’s interest in the value of understanding law’s own history for the present (e.g. Ibbetson, 1999) with Modern History’s ideas on a ‘trajectory … still unfolding’ where past, present and future lie on the same continuum of societal evolution and development (Tosh, 2010). In this way, the module is strongly grounded in making connections between law and society through reference to ‘lives lived’ currently, and to possible futures. The paper explains that the module uses these reference points to promote how enriched understandings of law itself and its interactions with society can be achieved through examining these dynamics across long timeframes.
In now being able to reflect on three academic cycles of ‘pandemic teaching’ the paper explains how asking students to reflect on their ‘lives lived’ has presented challenges and much discomfort even, and that this is likely to continue into the near future (at the very least). But the paper also suggests that these troubled times might actually create opportunities for the avocational values – ones of citizenship and social cohesion- which the module has always championed, to have greater foregrounding, and to do so as we live through our (individual and collective) present and envision a (hopefully) post-Covid future.