Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Website URL: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/r/helen-rutherford/

Keywords: Coroners and inquests, criminal trials, execution culture, images and the law, micro history, local history (North East England)

About Me: I am a qualified solicitor. I graduated from Newcastle University in 1989 with an LL.B (hons) degree. I have an MA in history and a PhD in legal history from Newcastle University. My PhD examines the life and work of the coroner for Newcastle- The Coroner in an Emerging Industrial Society: John Theodore Hoyle and Newcastle upon Tyne 1857-1885

I joined Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England in 2012. I teach Civil Litigation, Legal History, and Inquests. I supervise final year archival/legal history projects.

Recent Publications

Courting Power: discussion and analysis of a courtroom-based art installation informed by a legal historical case study, J Latchem and H Rutherford 2021- Law and Humanities 2021
Contributions to The Newcastle Gaol Project
‘All That They Had Heard, All That They Had Seen’: Questions of Fairness and Justice in the Trial of George Vass, H Rutherford and C Sandford- Couch, C 2020, Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940 (Bloomsbury Academic 2020)
Edited collection Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual (Routledge 2020) Patrick Low (Editor), Helen Rutherford (Editor), Clare Sandford- Couch (Editor)
Unity or disunity? The trials of a Jury in R v John William Anderson: Newcastle Winter Assizes 1875
H Rutherford, in Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century. J Gregory & DJR Grey (eds.)(Routledge 2019)
’13 yards off the big gate and 37 yards up the West Walls’: Crime scene investigation in mid-nineteenth century Newcastle-upon-Tyne H Rutherford & C Sandford-Couch, in Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850. A Adam (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan 1919)
From the ‘Death of a Female Unknown’ to the Life of Margaret Dockerty: Rediscovering a Nineteenth Century Victim of Crime H Rutherford & C Sandford-Couch 2018- Law, Crime and History. 8, 1.