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 Lammasniemi is a legal historian whose research examines the intersections of criminal law, gender and class, with a particular focus on the legal history of sexual offences and how the most marginalised women and girls have experienced and navigated the criminal justice system.

From 2020 to 2022, she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the project Narratives of Sexual Consent in Criminal Courts, 1870–1950, examining how sexual consent was understood and articulated across 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 work includes research on the history of the age of consent, trafficking in women, and colonial legal history. As part of the Indian Feminist Judgments Project, she co-authored an article on the nineteenth-century colonial case Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai, which won the Indian Law Review Best Article Prize 2021. She is also interested in the gendered impact of economic austerity in contemporary contexts.

She is co-author of Wilson and Lammasniemi, Criminal Law (Pearson, 8th edition, 2024) and author of Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide (Routledge, 3rd edition, forthcoming 2026).

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 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.