Featured today in our Scholar Spotlight series is Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard University. In our earlier interviews, we noted that only three of the fifty contributors to the recently published Oxford Handbook of European Legal History were women. Like Women Also Know History, this Scholar Spotlight series aims to showcase female scholars and their work. Its special focus is scholars of European legal history. Elizabeth Papp Kamali is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
Websites:
https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/11491/Kamali
Twitter:
@LizPappKamali
Alma
maters: A.B. (History), Harvard College, 1997; J.D.,
Harvard Law School, 2007; Ph.D. (History), University of Michigan, 2015.
Fields
of interest: English legal history, medieval law, criminal
law.
Describe
your career path. What led you to where you are today?
A class taught by Charles Donahue sparked my
interest in medieval law during my freshman year of college, when I was
contemplating a variety of majors, including engineering. The class reading focused
on primary sources, and I discovered that I had a passion for dissecting and
making sense of unfamiliar, at times perplexing, legal texts. I knew nothing
about law going in (‘Torts? Is that a kind of cake?!’), but I knew by the time
the semester ended that I wanted to find a life in the law, preferably of the
medieval variety. With the encouragement
of Prof. Donahue and then-graduate students Carol Symes and Claire Valente, I
undertook senior thesis research using fourteenth-century manorial court rolls
held in the Harvard Law Library’s collection. What a charmed undergraduate
life!
Upon graduating from college, I decided to work
in Wall Street consulting for a year or two to pay off my undergraduate debt
before moving on to law and/or graduate school. Life intervened. I met my
future spouse in Manhattan and ended up following him to rural California,
where he was obligated to work in a doctor shortage area for several years.
When his work commitment ended, he (and our one-year-old son) followed me, in
turn, first to Cambridge, MA, for my law studies, and later (with our
one-year-old daughter and then nearly five-year-old son) to Ann Arbor, MI, for
my PhD studies in History. I am ever grateful to have a spouse who has made my
flourishing his priority. At the University of Michigan, I studied with Tom
Green, historian of the English jury, just as he was entering retirement. I am
most fortunate to enjoy his continued mentorship and friendship, and I hope I
can live up to his generous example in making time to read and comment upon
others’ scholarship. Academic life dulls when solitude—admittedly necessary at
times when, for example, the archives beckon or a publishing deadline looms—supplants
community.
The University of Michigan was an exceptional
place for me to pursue a PhD in medieval legal history. In addition to
outstanding medieval historians on the History faculty, the university had a
vibrant medieval studies community and incredible course offerings at the law
school, where I studied English legal history with Brian Simpson, Roman law
with Bruce Frier, and medieval Icelandic bloodfeuds with Bill Miller. My
dissertation committee included Diane Owen Hughes (see my recommended reading
below) and Kit French from the History department, Cathy Sanok from the English
department, and my long-standing mentor from college and law school, Charlie
Donahue, as co-chair with Tom Green.
Now, at Harvard Law School, I have the pleasure
and privilege of teaching Criminal Law to first-year students, some of whom
will hopefully help shape public policy and legal practice during this critical
moment in the history of the U.S. criminal justice system. I also teach English
Legal History and a seminar on Mind and Criminal Responsibility in the
Anglo-American Tradition.
What
projects are you currently working on?
My forthcoming book, Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Studies in Legal
History Series, Cambridge University Press) explores the role of mens rea as a
factor in jury assessments of guilt and innocence during the first two
centuries of the English criminal trial jury. The book argues that issues of
mind were central to jurors’ determinations of whether a particular defendant
should be convicted, pardoned, or acquitted outright. Writing it required me to
sift through legal records (accessible here http://aalt.law.uh.edu/
on the amazing website created by Robert Palmer, professor emeritus at the
University of Houston Law Center) as well as literary and religious texts from
the period. What a charmed law professor’s life, teaching Criminal Law by day
and reading Aquinas, coroners’ rolls, and Gower by night!
I am also working on what I affectionately call
my “living dead” paper on the topic of proof of death in medieval English
criminal and civil law as well as an article on the treatment of intoxication
in the medieval common law. Late ordeal
practice fascinates me, and I hope to publish a lengthier treatment of it,
building upon an essay I wrote for a recent Festschrift honoring Bill Miller.
Is
there an article, book, film, website, etc. that you would recommend to LHB readers?
It is rare that a work of academic scholarship
can be described as moving, but thankfully such pearls exist. This is not primarily
a work of legal history, but an article I recommend nonetheless to LHB
readers: Diane Owen Hughes,
“Distinguishing Signs: Ear-rings, Jews, and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian
Renaissance City,” Past & Present
112 (1986), 3-59 (https://doi.org/10.1093/past/112.1.3).
The closing paragraphs continue to give me chills, and behind them is a
wonderful personal story about how Prof. Hughes stumbled upon the Bellini
portrait that clinches the article. I
leave that personal story to Prof. Hughes to tell, and only hope that I might
learn to craft a work of scholarship as beautifully as she did in these few
pages of Past & Present.