Professor Shaheen Ali was an invited speaker at the International Women's Day celebrations organized by Eversheds at their Manchester office on the 3rd of march 2016.

Tuesday 8 March will mark this year’s International Women’s Day, a day to that celebrates the economic, political and social achievements of women across the globe. To find out more about International Womens Day please click here.

The Universities of Monash and Warwick have a cross University Alliance, supporting staff and student exchange and innovative international research programs. The Centre for Women’s Studies & Gender Research and the Centre for the Study of Women & Gender in 2015 were recipients of an Alliance SEED Grant. A Workshop held in July at the Monash Prato Campus has resulted in a formal partnership, which will build gender research across the two Centres. Graduate student exchange and research programs focused on sustainability and gender and care are underway.

Read the Alliance Gender Workshop Report for full details. See Monash news also.

Applications for the Joint PhD Monash Warwick are particularly encouraged from qualified graduate students seeking to undertake gender focused research. Both the Monash and Warwick Centres have a very strong record in graduate supervision.

Shaheen Sardar Ali was invited to present a paper entitled: 'In Search of Authority and Authenticity? UK Shari'a Councils and Muslim Women's Rights' at an international conference: Legal Pluralism and human rights within family disputes in Europe organised by the Ghent University Human Rights centre 26-27 October 2015 to find out more click here.

Recent years have seen extensive discussion about the continuing retreat from marriage, the increasing demand for the right to marry from previously excluded groups, and the need to protect those who do not wish to marry from being forced to do so. At the same time, weddings are big business, couples are spending more than ever before on getting married, and marriage ceremonies are increasingly elaborate. It is therefore timely to reflect on the rites of marriage, as well as the right to marry (or not to marry), and the relationship between them.

To this end, this new interdisciplinary collection brings together scholars from numerous fields, including law, sociology, anthropology, psychology, demography, theology and art and design. Focusing on England and Wales, it explores in depth the specific issues arising from this jurisdiction’s Anglican heritage, demographic development, current laws and social practices.

THE LAW ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN BANKS

Iris H-Y Chiu, University College London, UK and Consulting Editor, Michael McKee, Partner, DLA Piper With contributions from Anna P. Donovan, University College London, Rod Edmunds, Queen Mary University of London, Andreas Kokkinis, University of Warwick and University College London, John Lowry, Hong Kong University, Marc T. Moore, University of Cambridge, Arad Reisberg, University College London, Georgina Tsagas, University of Bristol, Edward Walker-Arnott, University College London and Herbert Smith Freehills, UK

In the UK Research Excellence Framework results (announced 18 December 2014), Warwick Law School was assessed as coming 6th out of 67 Law Departments in terms of its Research Environment, 7th in terms of the Quality of its Research and 10th overall.

Full details can be found on the REF website.

Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict (10-13 June 2014).

The summit seeks to translate the UN General Assembly's Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict into real progress on the ground. More details are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/sexual-violence-in-conflict.

Rebecca Probert’s article ‘“A Banbury Story”: cohabitation and marriage among the Victorian poor in ‘notorious Neithrop’, published in Cake and Cockhorse, has won the British Association for Local History’s Publication Award for 2014.

'Caring about Care in a Global Market Place'

Stephanie Esuola wins TARGETjobs Undergraduate of the Year Award. The award was sponsored by Mayer Brown and, through a series of online tests, application forms, interviews and assessment exercises, she emerged as winner. Stephanie is the first woman to win this award and she gets a fully paid place on Mayer Brown’s Summer Work Experience Programme and an iPad.

Mayer Brown only targeted a relatively small number of universities and so she beat off competition from other excellent students from other excellent universities. This award was one of twelve presented on the day and each award was sponsored by a top graduate recruiter: Barclays, Mars, Ernst & Young, Laing O’Rourke, E.ON, EDF Energy, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Rolls-Royce, Gazprom, Nestle and Mayer Brown.

Stephanie collecting the award from Sir Trevor McDonald (who hosted the awards) and Annette Sheridan, COO at Mayer Brown.

The Legal Regulation of Cohabitation examines hundreds of reported and unreported cases, as well as legislation, policy papers, debates in Parliament to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has been transformed over the past four centuries – from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth century.

Alongside this, drawing on thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles, it charts how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time – from the denunciatory phrases of the early part of the period, through the namelessness of cohabitation in the nineteenth century, wartime ‘unmarried wives’, the ‘living in sin’ of the mid-twentieth century, the ‘stable illicit unions’ of the Law Commission’s 1966 report on divorce, the ‘common-law wives’ of the 1970s, the ‘live-in lovers’ of the 1980s and early 1990s to the ‘partners’ of today.

These different terms both influenced and were influenced by policy debates and public perceptions of cohabitation. Law and language were also intertwined with the third key theme of the book – a reassessment of the incidence of cohabitation in past times. Having carried out innovative cohort studies of over 5,000 couples, the book provides new and more accurate evidence of the extent (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in earlier centuries. For more information go to: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/culture/cohabitation/

Rebecca Probert featured on the BBC4 programme ‘Harlots, Housewives and Heroines’ which was aired on Tuesday 29^th May. In the show Lucy Worsley explores the ordinary as well as the extraordinary lives of women in the home. Rebecca was interviewed along with other experts. In the episode it explored whether their lives had changed for the better or worse during the second half of the 17^th century.