'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.

Ann Stewart was recently interviewed at a conference in Coimbra, Portugal about her recent book and her work on gender studies.

To listen to the interview Click here and then click on Podcast

Ann Stewart was invited to give the inaugural Tove Stang Dahl memorial public lecture at the Law Faculty at the University of Oslo Norway on 7^th March.

The title of the lecture was ‘Who do we care about? Reflections on gender , law and justice ‘ based on her book 'Gender Law and Justice in a Global Market' (CUP 2011)

Tove Stang Dahl was a Norwegian legal scholar, criminologist, Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo from 1988 until her death, and a pioneer of feminist jurisprudence. She was one of the founders of the field of women's law as an academic discipline at the University of Oslo. Anne Hellum Professor of Women’s Law introduced the lecture. It was attended by leading academics as well as policy makers and activists with interests in gender and law issues within Norway and internationally. The lecture was followed by a very stimulating audience discussion.

On 8^th March Ann gave a guest lecture to staff and students involved with the Women's Law and Human Rights international masters’ programme. The topic was ‘Disability Discrimination by Association: A Case of the Double Yes’ and involved a discussion of Ann’s published work with her colleagues, Sylvia Niccolai and Catherine Hoskyns on Coleman v Attridge Law in the European Court of Justice (Social and Legal Studies 20 (2): 173-190.)

The study day on violence against women organised by the Law School in conjunction with local women's groups, and featuring contributions from Alan Norrie and Donna Chung, has been nominated for a programme action award by the organisation Soroptimist International of Great Britain and Ireland. For details of these awards and previous nominations see http://soroptimist-gbi.org/our-work/programme-action-awards/

Rebecca Probert has been shortlisted for a prize in the 2011 Family Law Awards. The Family Law Awards 2011 will be hosted by Clive Coleman and are an opportunity to celebrate and recognise the many successes and outstanding achievements of family law practitioners. They are an opportunity for Family Law and its readers to acknowledge the hard work and commitment throughout the year among the nominees and the profession as a whole.

The Awards will take place on 18 October 2011 at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, London.
For more details of this award see the link below. http://familylawawards.com/#/nominees/4555349264

Shaheen Ali presents a keynote paper at international workshop in Helsinki “Friend or Foe? Law Reform as double edged sword for women. Some Critical Reflections on Selected law reform in Pakistan and implications for women’s human rights” at the international workshop Women's Agency and Law: Perspectives from the Nordic and the Global South, organized by the Helsinki Collegium of the University of Helsinki, Finland on 30 May 2011.

ABSTRACT:

This presentation attempts to problemmatize the concept of law reform in the Muslim world as an effective tool of social engineering and advancement of women’s rights. It raises a number of questions in this regard including inter alia:

Has law reform proved to be an ally or foe of Muslim women in post-colonial jurisdictions including Pakistan? Under the broad framework of this overarching question, we seek to investigate the following:

To what extent has law reform in Pakistan responded to the demands of the women’s movement?

Women activists have often invoked Islamic law to seek law reform. As a strategy, how has this approach impacted on gender justice?

Can law reform counter discriminatory plural legalities (such as misogynistic customary practices)?

After providing a brief historical overview of law reform impacting on women in the global south focussing on the Indian sub-continent (as it was then) the paper will move on to focus on law reform in Pakistan. It will interrogate the application and impact of selected laws including the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939 (DMMA); Muslim Personal (Shariat Application)Act 1937 (MPL);the Muslim Family Law Ordinance 1961 (MFLO); the Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) 1979 and the Women Protection Act 2006 (WPA)of Pakistan.