Laura Lammasniemi

Associate Professor

Co-Director of the UG Supervised Projects
Co-Director of CJC
STP & GTA Development Director

Criminal Law; Legal History, Gender and Law; History of Crime

School of Law
B1.01, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

024 761 50503

Scholarship

Laura’s principal research interests lie in criminal law, gender, and class, primarily from a historical perspective. From 2020 to 2022, she was a Leverhulme Research Fellow for the project Narratives of Sexual Consent in Criminal Courts, 1870–1950. This research examined how sexual consent was understood and articulated by victims, defendants, judges, and witnesses during sexual offences trials, and how these understandings evolved over time. Arising from this project, she has published on procurement offences in Social & Legal Studies and on capacity to consent to sex in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (OJLS). The latter article was shortlisted for the Socio-Legal Studies Association Best Article Prize in 2024. Related to her work on sexual offences, Laura has also published on the history of the age of consent, trafficking in women, and on the transmission of venereal disease.

While much of her work focuses on 19th- and 20th-century England, she is also interested in colonial legal history. As part of the Indian Feminist Judgments Project, she co-authored a feminist judgment for the 19th-century colonial case Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai which won the Indian Law Review Best Article Prize in 2021.

In contemporary contexts, Laura has written on the gendered impact of economic austerity. Across her work, she examines the intersections of criminal law, social class, and gender, often focusing on how the most marginalised women have navigated criminal justice system.

Laura is also the co-author of a leading criminal law text book (Wilson and Lammasniemi, Criminal Law (8th edition Pearson, 2024)).

Bio

Laura joined Warwick Law School as an Assistant Professor in 2018. She holds LL.B (Hons), LLM in Human Rights and PhD (London). Before joining Warwick, she taught at ARU, Birkbeck College, and SOAS. Laura has spoken at the House of Commons on modern slavery and participated in BBC TV and radio shows as a legal history expert (see media section for further detail & links). In 2021, she was selected as the British Science Festival Award Lecturer for Social Sciences. Laura won the the Indian Law Review Best Article Prize 2021 for a co-authored piece, 'Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai (1886) ILR 10 Bom 301: rewriting consent and conjugal relations in colonial India'. She has published widely on histories of sexual offences and her article on capacity to consent to sex, published in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, was shortlisted for SLSA Best Article Prize 2024.

Laura was a Leverhulme Fellow 2020-2022, leading a project on history of sexual consent in criminal courts. Read more about the project here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/research/projects/sexual-consent

Publications

Lammasniemi, Laura, 2024. Police Court Rota : women?s archiving and access to legal life in early twentieth-century England. Women's History Review, 33 (1), pp. 7-24
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2024. Capacity to consent to sex : a historical perspective. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 44 (4), pp. 979-1001
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2023. Trafficking, rape, or deceptive sex? a historical examination of procurement offences in England. Social & Legal Studies, 32 (4), pp. 499-518
Lammasniemi, Laura, Sharma, Kanika, 2021. Governing conjugality : social hygiene and the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights in England and India in the nineteenth century. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 47 (1), pp. 67-84
Sharma, Kanika, Lammasniemi, Laura, Sarkar, Tanika, 2021. Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai (1886) ILR 10 Bom 301 : rewriting consent and conjugal relations in colonial India. Indian Law Review, 5 (3), pp. 265-287
Gayoye, Martha, Hunter, Mateenah, Manji, Ambreena, Matinda, Miriam, Sekalala, Sharifah, Chaudhary, Rachna, Lammasniemi, Laura, Munoth, Shreya, Prabhat, Devyani, Sen, Jhuma, Black, Gillian, Cowan, Sharon, Kennedy, Chloë, Munro, Vanessa, 2021. Correction to : Feminist judgments projects at the intersection. Feminist Legal Studies, 29 (2), pp. 263-265
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2020. ?Precocious girls? : age of consent, class and family in late nineteenth-century England. Law and History Review, 38 (1), pp. 241-266
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2017. Regulation 40D : punishing promiscuity on the home front during the First World War. Women's History Review, 26 (4), pp. 584-596
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2017. Anti-white slavery legislation and its legacies in England. Anti-Trafficking Review, pp. 64-76
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2016. The benefit cap and the complexity of discrimination : R (SG and others) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Feminist Legal Studies, 24 (2), pp. 215-221

Lammasniemi, Laura, Sharma, Kanika, 2024. Age of Marriage Act 1929. Auchmuty, Rosemary; Rackley, Erika; Takayanagi, Mari (eds.), Women?s Legal Landmarks in the Interwar Years: Not for the Want of Trying, Bloomsbury Publishing
Wilson, William, Lammasniemi, Laura, 2024. Criminal law. London, Pearson
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2021. Law dissertations : a step-by-step guide. London, Routledge
Lammasniemi, Laura, Lammasniemi, Laura, 2021. Law dissertations : a step-by-step guide. London, Routledge
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2019. International legislation on white slavery and anti-trafficking in the early 20th century. Winterdyk , John; Jones, Jackie (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2018. Law dissertations : a step-by-step guide. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, Routledge
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2018. Rose Heilbron. Rackley, Erika; Auchmuty, Rosemary (eds.), Women's Legal Landmarks : Celebrating 100 Years of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland, Hart Publishing
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2017. Welfare, anti-austerity and gender : new territory and new sources of hostility for the Human Rights Act. In Cowell, Frederick (ed.), Critically Examining the Case Against the 1998 Human Rights Act, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, pp. 151-165

Lammasniemi, Laura, 2023. Review of Colonial law in India and the Victorian imagination by Leila Neti, and Disaffected : emotion, sedition, and colonial law in the Anglosphere by Tanya Agathocleous. Victorian Studies, Indiana University Press, pp. 301-304
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2019. Review of Revisiting the law and governance of trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery by Kotiswaran, P.. Social & Legal Studies, Sage, pp. 414-417
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2019. The benefit cap and infliction of poverty. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, Routledge, pp. 368-371
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2017. 'White slavery' : the origins of the anti-trafficking movement. Open Democracy
Lammasniemi, Laura, 2016. Naming & shaming women : reporting on VD trials during WWI. Notches

Teaching Projects

Funded

Title	Funder	Award start	Award end
Feminist Lawyering and International Law: Women Jurists in European Legal History (1899-1949) (Paola Zichi - BA Postdoc Fellowship 2nd stage application)	British Academy	01 Sep 2023	31 Aug 2026
Aisel Omarova - Researchers at risk fellowship	British Academy	01 Jan 2023	04 Jan 2026
Costed Extension: Narratives of sexual consent in criminal courts, 1870?1950 (Leverhulme Research Fellowship)	Leverhulme Trust	01 Aug 2021	30 Jun 2022
Narratives of sexual consent in criminal courts, 1870-1950	Leverhulme Trust	01 Oct 2020	31 Jul 2021
White Slavery in Transnational and International Context, 1880-1950 - Conference Funding 21 June 2019	Royal Historical Society	13 Jan 2019	12 Jan 2020

Highlighted

Narratives of sexual consent in criminal courts, 1870-1950

Dr Laura Lammasniemi has been awarded Leverhulme Fellowship for her project, “Narratives of sexual consent in criminal courts, 1870-1950”. Read more about the project and listen to podcast series here:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/research/projects/sexual-consent/

Age of consent and child-marriage in the British Empire

This is a collaborative project with Dr Kanika Sharma (SOAS). This interdisciplinary project aims to explore the debates that led to the reform of age of consent laws in UK and their introduction in other parts of the Empire at the end of the 19th Century. Intertwined within these debates are notions of gender, women’s rights, biology, and attempts to understand the ‘native’ psyche. These compete with tropes of cultural relativism, orientalism, the female victim, and the white (wo)man’s burden amongst other concerns.

The project seeks to start a dialogue that recognises not only the contemporary legal frameworks, but also analyses their historical interrelatedness and the impact that they had on one another. It also seeks to examine the impact of particular campaigners on the discourse around, and laws on, age of consent. We are particularly interested in how consent is/was understood within law, religion and society; the distinctions made between physical and intellectual maturity in relation to capacity to consent; and how these were imagined for different sexes and different nationalities within the Empire.

Impact

Public Understanding

In 2021, Laura was chosen to deliver the 2021 British Science Association Social Sciences Award Lecture, in recognition of her innovative research and commitment to public engagement.