Power, law and money: What history can teach us

What can courtroom battles, Agatha Christie novels and financial history tell us about the society we live in today?

Join The Open University for a special double inaugural lecture featuring Faculty of Business & Law researchers, Professor Caroline Derry and Professor Dimitris Sotiropoulos, whose research demonstrates how history can help us understand some of the most pressing questions about power, inequality and social change.

Lawyers, lesbians, and Agatha Christie

Professor Caroline Derry will explore how twentieth-century criminal law and the legal profession shaped the lives of women. Drawing on sources ranging from court records to the novels of Agatha Christie, her lecture examines attitudes towards women barristers and same-sex relationships, revealing the lasting influence of gender on legal systems and institutions.

Abstract

Agatha Christie once described women barristers as ‘rather a joke’. In this lecture, Professor Derry takes her seemingly shocking comment as a starting point to ask three questions.

First, how useful is Christie and her work as a source for legal history? Her career spanned over half a century, during which she published best-selling novels and short stories as well as some of the West End’s most successful plays. They reflected contemporary attitudes, particularly those of her own social circles which included legal professionals. Exploring Christie’s writing is therefore potentially a good way of throwing light on changing legal attitudes.

The second question, then, is do Christie’s attitudes really match those of the legal profession closely enough to do this? To answer it, the lecture briefly considers how Christie’s depictions of relationships between women compare to the criminal courts’ changing understandings of them. In doing so, it provides an explanation for why judges’ comments about same-sex relationships seemed to be based on views about a generation behind those of experts and activists. It also highlights gender as a factor which continues to underpin the criminal law.

Finally, returning to Christie’s suggestion that women barristers were ‘rather a joke’, the lecture looks at attitudes to women barristers from when they first qualified in 1922 until she wrote that comment in 1957. A selection of sources, from newspapers to judges’ comments, show the continuing barriers that women have faced in the legal professions. However, Christie’s own attitudes bear further consideration and the lecture ends by suggesting that her remark was not all that it seemed.

Read more about Professor Caroline Derry

Finance and power: The view from history

Drawing on his academic journey, from mechanical engineering to the history of ideas and financial history, in his inaugural lecture, Professor Dimitris Sotiropoulos will reflect on how history can be understood not as a mere record of past ideas and events, but as a vital lens for thinking critically about the present and reimagining the future.

Turning to the evolution of the financial system, he will provide examples of how capitalist societies have consistently been shaped by specific technologies for dealing with risk, arguing that a key to understanding modern capitalism lies in how we connect power and financial risk analytically.

Read more about Professor Dimitris Sotiropoulos

Attendance

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Event programme