Early Women Law Students at Cambridge and Oxford

This article examines the hitherto neglected history of the twelve women who studied law at Cambridge and Oxford in the years up to 1900. It concludes that the reason why so little has been written about them is, first, because women's experience has been routinely ignored in accounts of legal education (and in history generally) and, second, because their entry to the university law schools was accomplished with very little fuss or opposition. This in turn was due not only to the fact that the law professors were generally sympathetic to higher education for women but also because the women themselves did not challenge university traditions or the men's curriculum.     

Choice,Privacy and Publicly Funded Legal Advice at Police Stations

Section 58 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 confers on all suspects held in police custody a right to consult a solicitor in private. The free legal advice which suspects arrested for certain minor offences can request is restricted to telephone advice from a call‐centre operated by CDS Direct. It is lawful for the Legal Services Commission to restrict the delivery of legal advice in this way. Empirical research, however, reveals that there are police stations that lack the facilities for suspects to speak by telephone with legal advisers secure in the knowledge that what is said will not be overheard. It is unlawful and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights to expect suspects to speak by telephone to a legal adviser under such conditions.