Annual Diversity, Dilemmas and Discoveries Conference - Moments of Rupture

Dates
Thursday, November 20, 2025 - 14:00 to Friday, November 21, 2025 - 16:30
Location
Online

Join our Legal Histories research cluster for the 6th annual Diversity, Dilemmas and Discoveries Conference - Moments of Rupture.

Some legal and social changes are so profound that they create what seem to be moments of rupture: breaks between the ‘before’ and ‘after’. These moments can take many forms including new laws, new civil codes, court judgments and new organisations. But are these events really ruptures? If so, how was such significant change achieved? If not, how was continuity maintained?

This free, online event on Thursday 20th and Friday 21st November 2025, is hosted by The Open University Law School Legal Histories research cluster. The conference features papers discussing the role of ruptures in the way we interpret legal history and the way that legal history itself is re-moulded.

Register to attend

Programme

Thursday 20 November

14:00 Panel 1 – rupture and continuity in Scotland

  • Adelyn Wilson, ‘“Weell near all are wracked”: Rupture, reform and continuity in interregnum Scotland, 1650-1660’
  • Leslie Dodd, ‘Divided by Law, United by Faith: Thomas Craig and the Union That Never Was’
  • Robert Taylor, ‘Continuity and Change: Private and Public Law under the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union’
  • Jonathan Brown, ‘A Slow Tear, not a Quick Rip? The “Positivisation of Law”, Scots Jurisprudence and the Scottish Parliament’

15:15 Break

15:30 Panel 2 – Ruptures and the state

  • Carol Howells, ‘Militia Bills and the death of a king’
  • Gillian Mawdsley, ‘The Lockerbie and Ibrox Disasters: Illustrating Rupture and Cultural Change through the Death Investigation Process’

16:15 End

Friday 21 November

10:00 Keynote: Charlotte Smith, ‘The (Denning) Committee on Legal Records and rupture in law’s archives’

10:45 Break

11:00 Panel 3 – Ruptures in criminal law

  • Caroline Derry, ‘Sexual Offences Act 2003: a break from the past?’
  • Fred Motson, ‘Doubling down? Assessing the ‘abolition’ of double jeopardy 20 years on’

11:45 Break

12:00 Panel 4 – Ruptures in civil law (1)

  • Danielle Hopton-Jones, ‘Campbell v MGN- a ‘landmark’ in privacy?’
  • David Tilt, ‘Patent law in the before and after (and after): understanding nature, discovery, and tangibility’
  • Charles Mak, ‘Legal Education and Sign Language: A Moment of Rupture in Deaf Access to Justice’

13:00 Lunch

13:30 Panel 5 – Ruptures in civil law (2)

  • Tola Amodu, ‘Land-use planning control: Perpetuating a Myth?’
  • Bonheur Minzoto, ‘A Tale Mistold. On the historical application of limited liability to corporate groups and non-contractual creditors’

14:15 Break

14:30 Panel 6 - Land rights

  • Abdullah Fahim, ‘The Legal Invention of Empty Land’
  • Eliza Xue, ‘Opening Up the Box of Legal Dilemmas in Maritime Provinces: The R v Marshall Decision of the Supreme Court of Canada’
  • Tony Meacham, ‘Rupture and Native Title: A global perspective on colonial appropriation’

15:30 Break

15:45 Panel 7 – Ruptures in legal epistemologies

  • Qudsia Mirza, ‘From Continuity to Rupture: Women’s Authority and the Reimagining of Islamic Law’
  • Simon Lavis, ‘Revolutionary Change and the Discursive Construction of Rupture in Legal History’

16:30 End