Wilfrid Prest (born 1940) is a historian, specialising in legal history, who is professor emeritus at the University of Adelaide. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia [1], as well as being a Fellow of Queen's College, University of Melbourne.
He has published four sole-author books, two scholarly textual editions, nine edited collections, numerous journal articles and entries in works of reference.
Born in Melbourne of English parents and educated at schools in Melbourne, York and Cambridge, Wilfrid Prest read history at the University of Melbourne and then studied for his doctorate at the University of Oxford. He became a lecturer at the University of Adelaide in 1966. He subsequently spent two years (1969–71) as assistant professor at The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, before returning to the University of Adelaide, where he remained a member of the history department until July 2002. Between 1978 and 1985, he was also chairman of the Board of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
In 2002 he resigned his personal chair in History to take up an Australian Research Council Australian Professorial Fellowship; he moved to the Law School in 2003, and subsequently held his fellowship as a joint appointment between Law and History, while preparing a biography of William Blackstone. He is currently general editor of the forthcoming Oxford variorum edition of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.
The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (London: Longman, 1972)
The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America (London: Croom Helm, 1981; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981)
The Professions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987)
The Diary of Sir Richard Hutton, Justice of Common Pleas 1617–1639, with Related Documents (London: Selden Society, 1991)
John Bray: Law, Letters, Life (Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1997)
(with Kerrie Round and Carol Susan Fort), The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001)
(with Sharyn Roach-Anleu) Litigation Past and Present' (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2003)
The Letters of Sir William Blackstone, 1743–1780 (London: Selden Society, 2006)
Articles in Edited Volumes
"Why the history of professions is not written", in G. Rubin and David Sugarman (eds.), Law, Economy and Society 1750–1914: Essays in the History of English Law (Oxford: Professional Books Ltd., 1984)
"The experience of litigation in eighteenth-century England", in D. Lemmings (ed.), The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), pp. 133–54
"Legal Autobiography in Early Modern England", in R. Bedford, L. Davies and P. Kelly (eds.), Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 280–94
Archer, Sir John (1598–1682), judge
Ball, Sir Peter (bap. 1598, d. 1680), lawyer and antiquary
Blackstone, Sir William (1723–1780), legal writer and judge
Bulstrode, Edward (c.1588–1659), judge
Cook, John (bap. 1608, d. 1660), judge and regicide
Crewe [Crew], Sir Randolph (bap. 1559, d. 1646), judge
Denham, Sir John (1559–1639), judge
Finch, Sir Henry (c.1558–1625), author and lawyer
Foster, Sir Thomas (1548–1612), judge
Greene, John (1578–1653), sergeant-at-law
Harvey, Sir Francis (c.1568–1632), judge and politician
Hitcham, Sir Robert (bap. 1573, d. 1636), barrister and politician
Hoskins, John (1566–1638), poet and judge
Hutton, Sir Richard (bap. 1561, d. 1639), judge
Hyde, Sir Nicholas (c.1572–1631), barrister and politician
Hyde, Sir Robert (1595/6–1665), barrister and politician
Ley, James, first earl of Marlborough (1550–1629), judge and politician
Malet, Sir Thomas (c.1582–1665), judge and politician
Moore, Sir Francis (1559–1621), lawyer and politician
Nicolls, Sir Augustine (1559–1616), judge
Pagitt, Justinian (1611/12–1668), lawyer and diarist
Rokeby, Ralph (c.1527–1596), lawyer and administrator
Walter, Sir John (bap. 1565, d. 1630), judge and politician
Warburton, Sir Peter (c.1540–1621), judge
Wilde, Sir William, first baronet (c.1611–1679), judge and politician
Winch, Sir Humphrey (1554/5–1625), judge
Journal Articles
'Legal Education of the Gentry at the Inns of Court, 1560–1640', Past & Present, 38 (1967): 20–39
'Stability and Change in Old and New England: Clayworth and Dedham', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1976): 359–374
'The Dialectical Origins of Finch's Law', Cambridge Law Journal, 36 (1977): 326–352
'Judicial Corruption in Early Modern England', Past & Present, 133 (1991): 67–95
'Predicting Civil War Allegiances: The Lawyers' Case Considered', Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 24 (1992): 225–236
'"One Hawkins, A Female Sollicitor": Women Lawyers in Augustan England', The Huntington Library Quarterly, 57 (1994): 353–358
'William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Politics', The Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995): 464–480
'"To Die in the Term": The Mortality of English Barristers', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 26 (1995): 233–249
'Blackstone as Architect: Constructing the Commentaries', Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 15 (2003): 103–133
'Antipodean Blackstone: the Commentaries "Down Under"', Flinders University Journal of Law Reform, 6 (2003): 151–167
'The Religion of a Common Lawyer? William Blackstone's Anglicanism', Parergon, 23 (2004): 153–68
'Reconstructing the Blackstone Archive: Or, Blundering after Blackstone', Archives, 31 (2006): 108–118
