Cambridge PhD students awarded Sir Anthony Hart Doctoral Paper Prizes

We are delighted to announced that the Sir Anthony Hart Doctoral Paper Prize was awarded to two Cambridge PhD students, Giorgia Bucaria (St John's) and Declan Noble (Sidney Sussex), at the British Legal History Conference 2026 at the University of Nottingham last week.

Giorgia's paper discussed the English law of incorporeal rights in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Her paper explored how a statutory intervention in 1285 (the Statute of Westminster II, ch 25) changed how these rights were protected in royal courts and conceptualised by medieval lawmen. It also demonstrated how royal justices would often try to remedy gaps in the common law of incorporeal rights through a creative process of interpretation, and how this process was stunted by well-established doctrines on the nature of incorporeal rights.

Declan's presentation concerned the common law's supervision of local lawmaking in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He demonstrated that over the course of the sixteenth century it came to be established as a general rule that ordinances made for the "common good" could be passed by majority, as opposed to by unanimous assent or by a select body of lawmakers. This is an important example of how judges and lawyers in the period reduced complex political questions to matters of doctrine.

The Faculty congratulates Giorgia and Declan on this achievement.