Professor Mark Godfrey
- Professor of Legal History (School of Law)
telephone:
01413303725
email:
Mark.Godfrey@glasgow.ac.uk
206, Law, 5 The Square, Glasgow G12 8QQ
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1118-5747Biography
Mark Godfrey has taught private law and legal history at Glasgow since 2002. After undergraduate study at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Faculty of Law, University of Edinburgh, he completed a PhD in private law and legal history at Edinburgh and qualified as a solicitor. He was a tutor at the University of Edinburgh between 1993 and 1999 and a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen from 1999 to 2002 before moving to Glasgow as a lecturer in Scots law. He was promoted to a personal chair in legal history in 2012. Mark was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main for six months in 2006, supported by a European visiting research fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He also spent six months in 2012 as a visiting professor of law at the J W Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, and a visiting fellow in the LOEWE research project in Frankfurt on judicial and extra-judicial conflict resolution. In 2013 he organised the 21st British Legal History Conference at the University of Glasgow, subsequently editing a book based on papers from the conference for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2016 as Law and Authority in British Legal History, 1200-1900. With Professor Remco van Rhee (Maastricht University) he led an international research group on the history of central jurisdiction funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung which resulted in publication in 2020 of an edited book of essays on Central Courts in Early Modern Europe and the Americas in the series Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History.
Since 2016 Mark has been Literary Director of the Stair Society, having previously been a member of its Council from 1999 to 2011. He has also been a Member of the Panel of Research Assessors for the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland since 2014. He was Editor of The Journal of Legal History from 2011 to 2015, and has been a member of its Editorial Committee since 2004. He served as Book Reviews Editor of The Edinburgh Law Review from 2008 to 2012, Treasurer of the Society for Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Studies from 2010 to 2014, Secretary of the Scottish Legal History Group from 2004 to 2011, and as a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2012 to 2015. He has also served on the Council of the Scottish Record Society, the Editorial Board of The Records of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707, and in 2011-12 as UK National Adjudicator for the English Speaking Union/Essex Court Chambers National Mooting Competition. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2009.
Research interests
Mark’s research and teaching interests are in legal history and the law of obligations. His main research field is the history of central justice, courts, jurisdiction, private law and dispute settlement in medieval and early modern Scotland. He has published extensively on the origins and development of the Court of Session, and on the foundation of the College of Justice in sixteenth-century Scotland.
Publications
Selected publications
Godfrey, A. M. and van Rhee, C.H. (Eds.) (2020) Central Courts in Early Modern Europe and the Americas. Series: Comparative studies in continental and Anglo-American legal history, vol.34. Duncker und Humblot: Berlin. ISBN 9783428180332
Godfrey, M. , Pihlajamäki, H. and Dubber, M. D. (Eds.) (2018) The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History. Series: Oxford handbooks. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780198785521
Godfrey, A.M. (2014) Rethinking the justice of the feud in sixteenth century Scotland. In: Boardman, S. and Goodare, J. (eds.) Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300-1625: Essays in Honour of Jenny Wormald. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, pp. 136-154. ISBN 9780748691500 (doi: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748691500.003.0007)
Godfrey, A.M. (2010) Parliament and the Law. In: Brown, K. and MacDonald, A. (eds.) The History of the Scottish Parliament: Parliament in Context, 1235-1707. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9780748614868
Godfrey, A.M. (2009) Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: the Origins of a Central Court. Series: Medieval law and its practice, 4. Brill: Leiden ; Boston, MA. ISBN 9789004174665
All publications
Grants
Professor Mark Godfrey has been awarded the following grants:
2013
£29,529 was awarded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation to Professor Godfrey, and Professor Remco van Rhee of the University of Maastricht to conduct a three-year collaborative research project on "The Comparative History of Central Courts in Europe and the Americas". The project will focus on the period 1400 and 1700, tracing the origins and jurisdiction of European and American central courts and tribunals, and how they became accepted and embedded within the existing structures of jurisdiction and courts.
2012
£23,062 was awarded by the Johan Wolfgang Goethe - University, Frankfurt am Main, for research on Extrajudicial and Judicial Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Scotland as part of a collaborative LOEWE Research Project on "Extrajudicial and Judicial Conflict Resolution" involving the Goethe-University, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, and the Society for Imperial Chamber Court Research at Wetzlar.
