Wells - A Woman in Law

Reflections on Gender, Class and Politics

Celia Wells

With a Foreword by Nicola Lacey

W hat shapes the choices we make in our lives, and the feelings we have about the institutions in which we work? These apparently simple questions have been explored in terms of the frameworks of a range of disciplines social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, history; in the fora of the rich genres of biography, autobiography, the novel; and through a variety of social practices ranging from formalised therapies through to informal exchanges between family and friends. Yet our grasp of the relevant dynamics remains elusive.

Nowhere is this more so than in relation to academic careers. Perhaps the idea that what we work on and how we work on it and feel about it is shaped by wider and deeper factors than criteria of scientific interest and importance sits uncomfortably with the established understandings of the nature of the academic enterprise. If ideas have affective and historical conditions of existence, so the anxiety goes, that might undermine the claims to truth or impartiality on which scholarly authority are thought to rest. Or perhaps the increasing focus on objective outcomes as measures of purpose, meaning and success are inhospitable to the deep introspection and reflection needed to recover the connections between past experience and present intellectual interests or relationships.

In this beautifully written and searingly honest book, Celia Wells therefore gives us a rare resource: an emotionally articulate and deeply considered reflection on how these threads of connection have shaped her own personal and intellectual life: on how the past casts its light and shade on the present; on how the personal and the professional are constantly interwoven and indeed rewoven as we grow and learn; on how what troubles, engages, excites or intrigues us owes so much to our early experiences and encounters.

In Celias case, in addition to the influence of her parents political commitments and commitment to education, two strands in particular emerge as significant. The first is the way in which the vectors of power in relation to gender and class both exert structural constraints and infuse cultural norms, shaping the extent to which the academic environment can genuinely include and respect women and colleagues and students from working-class backgrounds. The second is the long shadow cast by mental ill-health and addiction.

I read Celias book with particular interest, not only because of our long personal and intellectual friendship, but also because I share her commitment to uncovering these connections. They first forced themselves on my attention in the mid-1980s, as I struggled with the experience of being the only woman Fellow at New College Oxford and sketched out a research life within a discipline which my unruly imagination has always made a somewhat uneasy home. My interest deepened 20 years later when I worked on the life of legal philosopher H L A Hart. This latter experience taught me that even the most apparently established, elite and distinguished academics can be beset by insecurities and feelings of being an outsider, even as their intellectual drive and sensibilities are underpinned by their life experiences. The discovery of this enduring inner struggle both deepened my admiration and respect for Hart, and illuminated for me the importance of the effort to be open about what Celia calls collisions and contingencies: the dynamics which both hamper us yet also enable us to do what we do and to become as well as to understand and accept who we are. The courage with which she has handled the challenges posed by each of these should inspire anyone who reads her book. It stands as an eloquent testimony to the power and importance of life writing as an intellectual and political endeavour which belongs at the heart of the academy.

July 2019

Celia Wells OBE is Emerita Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Bristol. An early exponent of the need to understand law in social, economic, gender and other contexts, in 1995 she became the first woman law professor at Cardiff University. A graduate of Warwick University she also taught law at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney. A long-term editorial board member of Criminal Law Review, her other roles have included joint editor of Legal Studies, consultant to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) on corporate liability for corruption, advisor and expert witness to Parliamentary Committees on corporate manslaughter and bribery, and member of the International Bar Association task force on Illicit Financial Flows and Tax Abuse. She is the author of Corporations and Criminal Responsibility (2001), Negotiating Tragedy (1995) and Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Nicola Lacey, latest edition 2010). Presented with the OBE in 2006 Celia Wells was President of the Society of Legal Scholars from 20062007.

Nicola Lacey CBE is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. From 2010 until September 2013 she was Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and at New York University Law School. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, served as a member of the academys Policy Group on Prisons, which reported in 2014, and is its nominee on the Board of the British Museum. In 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice and Gender Politics.