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Staff Profile

Dr Kay Crosby

Senior Lecturer in Law

Background

Introduction

I have been at Newcastle since 2012, initially as a lecturer and from 2019 as a senior lecturer. Before that, I was a tutorial assistant at the University of Leicester for three years while I did my PhD. My main research interest is jury trial, primarily via its history, primarily in England and Wales.


For the past few years, I have mainly focused on the jury as a citizenship institution. This research initially focused on women on the jury, although now takes in broader questions of the types of people who have historically been permitted to participate on juries.


In 2016, I was awarded funding by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust for an archival project exploring regional variations in the use of female jurors in the assize courts of 1920s England and Wales (jury service for women having been created by 1919 legislation). I have blogged about my research on women jurors for the 'First 100 Years' project, exploring the ways in which women were kept off juries after 1919, and the circumstances in which juries of matrons were abolished in 1931. I have also written about women and the jury on the British Academy's blog, as part of their 'Vote 100' series. I have also discussed this project on BBC Radio Leicester; and written an article for the Bristol Post discussing the first women to ever serve on a trial jury in England and Wales (in Bristol in 1920). My paper 'Keeping Women off the Jury in 1920s England and Wales' was one of three papers shortlisted for the best paper prize at the Society of Legal Scholars' 2016 conference. In 2020, I was again awarded funding by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust for an archival project, this time opening out my analysis to cover the interwar jury system and its relationship with developing ideas of citizenship more generally.


A second strand of my research explores the management of juries. I have published archival work on historic practices of juror punishment, and used this work as the basis of a critique of the decision in 2015 to create a series of new indictable offences concerning juror misconduct. I have blogged about this research for The Conversation.


A third strand of my research concerns the ability of jurors to resist or otherwise alter the content of the substantive criminal law. My publications on this topic have explored developing ideas of juror independence in the Restoration period, and how those ideas were taken up and developed in eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century America. As part of this research, I spent the winter of 2011-12 at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, as a British Research Council fellow at the Kluge Centre. This strand of my research has been cited in an amicus brief submitted to the US Supreme Court, and quoted from in a speech by Lady Justice Hallett on the jury system's past and its future. I have also written about the relationship between ideas of jury power and the twenty-first century criminal justice system's response to jurors' uses of the internet.


I also have an interest in the law of evidence, and in this connection I have published on the circumstances surrounding the House of Lords' decision in Woolmington v DPP.


My pronouns are she/they


Qualifications

PhD (Leicester) 2014

Newcastle Teaching Award (Newcastle) 2014 

LLM (Leicester) 2010

LLB (Sheffield Hallam) 2008


Roles and Responsibilities

School Research Ethics Coordinator (2022-)

Mentor on the Newcastle Educational Practice Scheme (2021-)

Examinations Board Chair (2019-2020)

Undergraduate Admissions Selector (2018)

Deputy Examinations Board Chair (2016-2018)

Co-organiser (with Nikki Godden-Rasul) of the Socio-Legal Studies Association conference, Newcastle 2017 (2015-17)

Member of the law school's research committee (2014-17)

Deputy Undergraduate Admissions Selector (2014-16)

Induction Coordinator (2013-16)

Mooting Coordinator (2013-14)


Memberships

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy 

Society of Legal Scholars

Socio-Legal Studies Association

Research

Research Interests

Legal history; criminal justice; jury trial 


Conference Presentations

Jun 2023: 'Riders and Recommendations in the Early Twentieth Century English Jury System' (SLS annual conference, Oxford Brookes University)

May 2023: 'Jurors and Jury Service in Interwar Bristol' (Staff seminar, University of Bristol)

Dec 2022: 'When the Parties Call for Jury Nullification: a comparative analysis' (The Jury Trial Conference, University of Worcester)

Nov 2020: 'Women on the Jury in Leicester after 1919' (Staff seminar, University of Leicester)

Jul 2019: 'Jury Trial and Jury Service after 1919' (British Legal History Conference, University of St Andrews)

Jun 2018: 'The Twentieth-Century Jury of Matrons' (10th Gerald Gordon Seminar on Criminal Law, University of Glasgow)

Jul 2017: 'Female Jurors and Administrative Independence in Early 1920s England' (British Legal History Conference, University College London)

Oct 2016: 'Abolishing Juries of Matrons' (Doing Women's Legal History Conference, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies)

Sep 2016: 'Keeping Women off the Jury in 1920s England and Wales' (SLS annual conference, University of Oxford)

Apr 2016: ‘Female Jurors in the 1920s Assize Courts’ (SLSA annual conference, Lancaster University)

Mar 2016: ‘Female Jurors in the English Assize Courts, 1920-1925’ (Staff Seminar: Faculty of Law, University of Toronto)

Jul 2015: ‘The General Verdict and the Rule of Law: the Dean of St Asaph’s case (1784)’ (Workshop: Landmark Cases in Criminal Law, University of Cambridge)

Apr 2013: ‘The Legal History and Legal Theory of the Criminal Trial Juror’ (2013 UK IVR conference, Queen Mary University of London)

Sep 2012: ‘Jury Independence and the General Verdict’ (SLS annual conference, University of Bristol)

Jan 2012: ‘Ideas of Jury Power’ (Work in progress talk: John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC)

Sep 2010: ‘The Trial Jury and the English Judge: A Tradition of Exclusion’ (SLS annual conference, University of Southampton)

Sep 2009: ‘Kelsen, Causation and Freedom’ (Critical Legal Conference, University of Leicester)


Funding

2020: £5,576.46 funding to cover archival research for the project "The Interwar Jury of England and Wales" (British Academy/Leverhulme Trust)

2018: £1,034 funding to cover archival research for the project "Female Jurors in the Quarter Sessions Courts of 1920s England" (Newcastle University)

2015: £4,478.70 funding to cover archival research for the project “Female Jurors in the English Assize Courts, 1920-1925” (British Academy/Leverhulme Trust).

2015: £3,758.70 funding to cover archival research for the project “Female Jurors in the English Assize Courts, 1920-1925” (Newcastle University).

2014: £1,100 funding to cover travel and accommodation in order to conduct archival research into official responses to juror misconduct in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England (Society of Legal Scholars).

2011: British Research Council Fellow at the John W Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, Washington DC. The fellowship consisted of £4,500 funding to carry out four months’ research on the changing role of the criminal trial jury in nineteenth-century America (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

2009-12: PhD funding – £13,590 a year for three years (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Stage Three

Evidence (LAW3016): module leader; seminars; lectures shared with Samantha Ryan

Law and History (LAW3038): module leader; lectures and seminars shared with Ian Ward


Previous Teaching Experience

Newcastle University (2012-)

Legal Institutions and Method (Stage One)

Criminal Law (Stage Two)

US Constitutional Law (Stage Three)

University of Leicester (2009-2012)

Learning Legal Skills (Stage One)

Criminal Justice System (Stage One)

Constitutional and Administrative Law (Stage One)

Publications