A Woman in Law

Celia Wells has been an `outsider' all her life: from an unconventional upbringing by her Communist Party parents (who would sit out the National Anthem), her colourful ancestors (one transported to Australia, another a bigamist), town not gown in Oxford, middle-class but living in a council flat, to swimming against the tide of male prejudice in her chosen career and coping with all those things that happen to individuals who do not belong. A Woman in Law traces all these developments: Part I `Accidental Communists' tells of the author's peculiar upbringing, her parents' Bohemian friends, their coded-language and against the grain and enquiring mind-set, which she inherited. Part II `Life, Law and Feminism' records her career and explains how, despite the odds, she became Cardiff University's first woman law professor. Cautioned by one male colleague that she might as well research not women academics but `Dogs and the Law', she rebounded with leading works on class, gender and politics as they affect women's legal progress. As she did on manslaughter, helping to found corporate responsibility. Part II also explains the challenges, rebuffs and excuses (largely those of men) that were (and she argues still are) the lot of women in law; and she recalls the domestic upsets, loyalties and tragedy that had to be fitted-in. Two memorable articles are reproduced as appendices: For the first, she contacted every woman law professor in the UK; and in the second made the case for corporate responsibility for homicide that we nowadays take for granted.