Conditions of the Award:
The Award
- From 2024, there will be 3 categories of prizes given as part of the ANZLHS Annual Prize in Legal History: best monograph; best journal article or book chapter; and best non-traditional research output, including digital and creative works. The Executive of the ANZLHS will award these three prizes for the works that have, in the judgment of the ANZLHS Executive, made the most significant contribution to the field of legal history in relation to Australasia since the award of the last prize.
Eligibility
- In order to be eligible authors must be a current member of the ANZLHS.
- Eligible authors includes those who write in the field of legal history in Australasia (broadly defined). In any cases of uncertainty as to eligibility, the decision of the Executive of the ANZLHS as to whether a work qualifies for the award is final.
- In order to be eligible, the award must bear a publication date of the calendar year immediately prior to the year in which the award is to be made. For example, if the award is made in 2017, the publication must bear the date 2016.
Administration and Adjudication
Nominations for submissions close on Friday 8 August 2025. The award will be announced at the AGM in December. Nominations should be sent to the president, preferably by email. From 2024, there will be 3 categories of prizes given as part of the ANZLHS Annual Prize in Legal History: best monograph; best journal article or book chapter; and best non-traditional research output, including digital and creative works.
Nominations can be made by anyone. Nominations must be in writing. Nominations must be sent to both the current President and the current Secretary of the ANZLHS. Their email addresses can be found on the Society’s webpage.
The award will be judged by the current Executive of the ANZLHS. For these purposes the Executive comprises the President, Vice-President, Australian Treasurer, New Zealand Treasurer, Immediate Past President, Secretary and the Editor of Law&History.
The Executive may delegate any tasks with relation to this award to other persons.
The Executive decision will be made by a majority vote and will not be open to review.
Where a member of the Executive has been nominated for the award, that member will abstain from voting on the award and will not be present when the Executive is considering the nominations.
Citation: ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History 2025 (best journal article)
The winner of the ANZLHS Annual Prize for Best Article was Mark Finnane, for his article “An atrocious crime”: perjury on trial in colonial Australia’ (2024) 21(2) History Australia 226-243
In relation to the article prize, the judges commented:
The articles submitted for the prize all had significant merit. They were very different from each other in subject matter, method and approach and it was a delight for the judges to see such a good field, auguring well for legal history in Australia in the future. However, we are agreed that Mark Finnane‘s article ‘“An atrocious crime”: perjury on trial in colonial Australia’ (2024) 21(2) History Australia 226-243 ranks as the outstanding winning entry. It is a most accomplished piece in every way, tackling an under-researched subject with originality, polish, analytical depth and narrative skill, combining statistical evidence from the Prosecution Project with detailed accounts of individual cases in Victoria’s Supreme Court, the major venue for perjury trials in nineteenth-century Australia. We consider this article to be a model of its kind.
Citation: ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History 2025 (best monograph)
The book prize was awarded to Catharine Coleborne, for her book Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840-1910 (Bloomsbury). The judges commented:
In Vagrant Lives, Coleborne examines the vagrant ‘from below’, offering an important contribution to our understanding of the policing of poverty in Australasia between 1840-1910. It draws upon police gazettes, prosecution data, newspaper reports, institutional records, travel and personal writing and visual images, amongst other sources. The author is keen to capture all of the different types of people who are caught up in the categorisation of ‘vagrant’, to understand how the convergence of mobility, poverty, vulnerability and transgression brought some people to the attention of the state and its vagrancy laws, as well as laws and institutions concerned with their welfare. Coleborne’s book is interested in the causes of vagrancy, the different and sometimes surprising ways it manifested, and also in the reasons why vagrancy was seen as a social and legal problem. Significantly, and adding to our knowledge of this topic, it also examines the entanglement of some First Nations people in vagrancy laws and discourses.
Exploring the different ways the Australian colonies and NZ defined and policed vagrancy, the book is rich with details from cases which add complexity to our understandings of the ways vagrancy brushes up against class, race, age, family, disability and gender. Vagrancy is also historically conflated with criminality, larrikinism, sex work, idleness, intoxication, homelessness and mental ill health, and the book is enlivened by cases that illuminate this. Police records reveal the uses of aliases to frustrate identification, and mug shots and records of distinguishing features to counteract this, all of which offer fertile sources for inquiry. In some instances, vagrancy is the label applied to people who resist institutionalisation in welfare homes, shelters or asylums.
The book includes illustrations and photographs which add value and texture to the analysis. It is accessibly in its writing style, and chapters and divided into shorter topics and case studies. Conceptually, it uses mobility and vulnerability, and emerging theoretical engagements with these, to bring new lenses to its inquiry. It achieves its aim of humanising the lives and experiences of people labelled ‘vagrant’.
Citation: ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History 2024 (best monograph)
Alecia Simmonds, Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law (La Trobe University Press, 2023)
This is an engaging and insightful study to the now archaic sounding tort known as ‘breach of promise to marry’. The author brings this action and its vexed history to light in a manner that is both erudite, illuminating and engaging. The author offers new perspectives on, and dimensions to the rationale and history of this cause of action in Australia. Despite its Pride and Prejudice overtones, the action for breach of promise to marry remained part of the law in Australia until well into the 20th century. The action provided jilted lovers a legal means to claim compensation for ‘breach of promise to marry’. Through the history of this tort the author explores the changing relationships between men and women, gender and law and changing social values and expectations.
This book has many strengths. It draws skillfully on both original court reports and the sometimes sensational and lurid newspaper accounts. Its extremely clear and engaging writing style is telling. It is a book of appeal to a general audience as well as an academic or specialist audience. The author opens an amazing window into human relationships, to say nothing of the lives and status of women in Australia. It makes extremely innovative and powerful use of press reports, primary legal material and the somewhat unpromising one of court documents relating to breach of promise proceedings. The book uses legal materials as a vehicle for writing social and cultural history that is hugely impressive. The use of testimony giving in the courtroom is really innovative, and the book shows how this neglected type of primary material can be used by a skilled researcher and historian as is utilised here to bring social history to life. The author’s compassion and wide sympathies were also impressive.
The book provides a significant and original contribution to a forgotten side of Australian law and history. The book thoroughly deserves the 2024 prize in a very competitive field.
ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History (best journal article or book chapter)
Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall, 2023 ‘Identification Photography and the Surveillance of Chinese Mobility in Colonial Australasia’ Australian Historical Studies 54 (2): 299–329.
This rich archival research presents a detailed and balanced consideration of the power of the state to implement anti-Chinese immigration laws and practices, highlighting the role of photographs attached to identification and exemption processes. An engaging contextualisation of the law and the significance of the records comes from the successful weaving of personal narratives to show how Chinese subjects positioned themselves in relation to ever shifting regulations and arbitrary administrative practices. The authors show the duality of submitting to unjust laws and resisting their capacity to control personal lives, through denying mobility and access to opportunity. Photographs are read from a top down and a bottom-up perspective. From a top-down perspective, the photograph is part of the demand for official documentation where the primary concern of the state is to enable control of Chinese populations by challenging the veracity of the record. From a bottom-up perspective, the photograph is a necessary tool to enable mobility, but also an assertion of self-awareness of identity, read through the photographic subject’s choices in mode of dress (western or Chinese) and engagement with photographic conventions in framing and props. Photographic copies had circulation beyond official use. The authors use historical records to bring to life the way belonging and acceptance is negotiated with the state through everyday practices and with officials, and negotiated by the exercise of agency of those subject to dehumanising laws as Chinese applicants to entry interact with the various iterations of a racist administration.
Citation: ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History 2023
Diane Kirkby
Maritime Men of the Asia-Pacific: True-Blue Internationals Navigating Labour Rights, 1906-2006, Diane Kirkby with Lee-Ann Monk and Dmytro Ostapenko, Liverpool University Press, 2022.
This is a rich study of Australian maritime union struggles over pay and conditions at sea and on the wharves. Its particular strength is the breadth of its scope, in time (a century) as well as geography. While its focus is on Australian actors, it places them firmly in the context of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. In doing so, the book draws out the interplay between national and international issues, and the relationship between Australian trade unions and those of India, Japan and China.
International legal history is rarely written as convincingly as the authors have managed to do here. They examine the interplay between the Navigation Acts, labour laws, immigration law, criminal law, and international law treaties and conventions. They also provide a subtle treatment of the interaction between racism and the protection of hard won Australian rights to pay and conditions. The authors offer readers new perspectives on, and dimensions to, historical figures already well-known in labour history, as well as introducing a new cast of characters, fleshing out the human side of a complex story. The writing style in engaging and clear, drawing out the complexity of the issues under consideration with nuance and depth, while remaining highly readable. The book offers an outstanding contribution to union and labour history, as well as the history of the Asia-Pacific more broadly. The book thoroughly deserves the 2023 prize.
Citation: ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History 2022
Kathy Bowrey
Kathy Bowrey’s Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author is an ambitious and important work of scholarship. Skilfully weaving together archival research with critical theoretical insight to probe the role of authorship in the long history of copyright, the book’s interdisciplinarity, attention to contemporary questions, and nuanced accounting of complex issues makes this an impressive work of law and history. It is a work which is accessible, comprehensive and enjoyable to read. It is an exemplar in the way historical knowledge can be presented and engaged with so that we can better understand the world around us.
Citation: ANZLHS, Annual Prize in Legal History 2021
Amy Milka
Amy Milka’s article “Temples of Justice: The Courtroom Space in Eighteenth-Century England’, law&history, 7(2), 2020, pp.67-97 argues that concerns about legal spaces such as courtrooms in eighteenth-century England were intrinsically connected to deeper criticisms about the workings of the law. The author argues that attitudes to English court spaces were inflected by three major concerns: improvement, public access and maintaining ‘majesty’. While previous writers have discussed the poor standard of older court premises (particularly Westminster Hall) and how that affected lawyers, judges and, to a lesser extent, litigants and jurors, Milka demonstrates how the spatial contexts of the law and legal proceedings shaped law’s public image in the eighteenth century. While previous writers have contrasted “open” “British” (or “English”) justice with the secrecy and perceived bias of European courts, it is rare indeed to see that strand of thought being placed into the context of courtroom architecture. The article demonstrates, through the use of an exemplary range of contemporary and more recent sources, that there was public concern that the obvious deficiencies of many court buildings not only limited public access to legal spaces and the ability to see and hear legal proceedings, but reflected a disregard for the symbolic primacy of the law as an element of the constitutional liberties of the English people. The decrepit state of some courthouses or of buildings occasionally used for court sittings is very ably contrasted with new constructions which reflected the Augustan values to which many aspired. A particular feature of the article is the recognition of courts outside London – and of the basis for, and importance of, theatricality in the Assize courts as a way of maintaining or engendering respect for the court and its judges.
Milka’s project is well-conceived and very well carried out. Not only is there a superb research base, but the argument is beautifully structured and presented in an extremely clear and lucid fashion. It is a pleasure to read and a real stimulus to re-evaluate much of the conventional thinking about English courts of the period. These features, in the judges’ opinion, placed this article above some other very strong entries, and made it a worthy winner of the ANZLHS prize for 2021.
Past Winners:
2020: Amanda Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
2019: Isabella Alexander, ‘Cartography, Empire and Copyright Law in Colonial Australia’. law&history 5, no. 1, 2018.
2018: Shaunnagh Dorsett, Juridical Encounters: Maori and the Colonial Courts (Auckland University Press, 2017)
2017: Mark Finnane & Andy Kaladelfos ‘Race and Justice in and Australian Court: Prosecuting Homicide in Western Australia 1830-1954’. Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016
2016: Libby Connors for Warrior: A legendary leader’s dramatic life and violent death on the colonial frontier (Allen & Unwin, 2015)
2015: No award.
2014: Amelia Thorpe for ‘Participation in planning: Lessons from the green bans’ (2013) 30 Environmental and Planning Law Journal 93
Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society 