Richard Ireland
Senior Lecturer
MA Oxon, LLM London
Contact
Email: rwi@aber.ac.uk
Phone: 01970 622721
Teaching Areas
Origins of Common Law, History of Crime and Punishment, Legal Theory, Law and Society and History of Criminology.
Postgraduate Supervision
Recent theses (Ph.D. and M.Phil) supervised have included historical investigations into the Community Service Order, the development of Income Tax procedures, the Poor Law, provision for lunatics, the inter-relation of law and literature in the eighteenth century and Chinese Copyright Law.
Research
These principally relate to aspects of Legal History and in particular to the history of crime and the criminal justice system. He is a co-author of
Imprisonment in England and Wales:
A Concise History. His book
A Want of Order and Good Discipline:
Rules, Discretion and the Victorian Prison was published in 2007 and he co-edited, in two volumes, an edition of
The Carmarthen Journal 1845-50, in 2010. His work relates the study of law and legal institutions to wider cultural developments and other cultural forms of expression. He has written articles, for example, on the impact of technological change on perceptions of criminality - investigating such developments as the growth of railways and of photography in the nineteenth century from this perspective. He has also written articles on the representation of law in the literature of Chaucer and in paintings both from the middle ages and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A wide range of different material - philosophical, anthropological, psychological - is evident too in his co-authorship with Chris Harding of
Punishment: Rhetoric Rule and Practice. He has also edited a collection of papers from the 15th British Legal History Conference, held at Aberystwyth, under the title
Legal Cultures, Legal Doctrine and one relating to the centenary of the Department ("
A Serious Undertaking"). His forthcoming book is a history of crime and punishment in Wales.
Additional Interests
He is a member of the Committee of the Welsh Legal History Society, has delivered the Hugh Alan McLean Lecture in Canada and the Inaugural Youard Lecture on Welsh Legal and Social History. He is a subject advisor to the Cambridge Library Collection.