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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.


I am an internationally recognised legal historian, whose work has been cited by scholars writing in Arabic, English, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian. My work has been quoted in a speech by Lady Justice Hallett, relied upon by the House of Commons Library, and cited in argument before the US Supreme Court. I have provided expert evidence to the New Zealand Law Society, which directly resulted in them dropping an investigation. I have repeatedly published in top legal journals. When for women’s history month 2024 the leading law journal the OJLS published a retrospective of fourteen pieces of feminist work going back to 1982, they included one of my articles. I was one of only four authors they included who was not a full professor at the time her article was published.


The first major strand of my research concerns jury history, focusing over the past decade on the intersection between jury history and gender history. I have published on shifting ideas of jury power between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, and on the role jury service had both as an expression of and a factor in the development of women’s citizenship during the twentieth century.


The second strand of my research asks how English criminal law - and in particular the law of evidence - developed after it became a more straightforwardly doctrinal area of law around the turn of the twentieth century. This second strand has principally focused on reverse burdens of proof, tensions between the centre and the periphery in the English criminal justice system, and the eradication of most historic types of jury. 


I am currently working on a project exploring trans pay gaps in UK Higher Education, following the UK Supreme Court’s decision to largely eliminate the protections that trans people in particular had enjoyed under the Equality Act for fifteen years. This project forms another part of the gender history work that lies at the heart of much of my scholarship.


Qualifications

PhD (Leicester) 2014

Newcastle Teaching Award (Newcastle) 2014 

LLM (Leicester) 2010

LLB (Sheffield Hallam) 2008


Leadership within Newcastle University

2024-28: Director of Education, Newcastle Law School

2023-: Member of HaSS faculty quality circle, reviewing external examiner reports from across the faculty

2023-: Member of Newcastle Law School DEI committee

2022-23: Newcastle Law School research ethics coordinator; member of law school research committee; member of HaSS faculty ethics committee

2022-23: Newcastle Law School reviewer for Northern Bridge/NINE DTP PGR scholarship schemes

2020-24: Mentor and assessor on the Newcastle Educational Practice Scheme

2019-21: Newcastle Law School examinations board chair; member of the law school PEC committee

2019-: Research mentor to multiple law school colleagues

2018-: Mentorship of law school colleagues from lecturers to professors seeking recognition as Senior Fellows of the Higher Education Academy

2018: Newcastle Law School undergraduate admissions selector

2017: Member of law school curriculum review subcommittee undertaking comparative work on the overall of the undergraduate law degree

2016-18: Newcastle Law School examinations board deputy chair; member of the law school PEC committee

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

2014-17: Newcastle Law School research committee member

2014-16: Newcastle Law School deputy undergraduate admissions selector

2013-16: Newcastle Law School induction coordinator

2013-14: Newcastle Law School staff liaison officer for mooting

2012-13: Newcastle Law School deputy staff liaison officer for mooting


Leadership beyond Newcastle University

2025-: Member of the University and College Union's Trans Rights Task Force

2024-: Research mentor for the international feminist legal history research network Selden's Sister

2024-: External examiner at University of Kent

2023-26: Member of Society of Legal Scholars EDI committee

2016-20: External examiner at BPP University

2016-18: Member of Socio-Legal Studies Association national executive committee


Memberships

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy 

Society of Legal Scholars

Socio-Legal Studies Association

Research

Research Interests

Legal history; gender history; criminal justice; law of evidence; jury trial 


Conference Presentations

2024: 'The jury system of Bristol, 1919-1939' (British Legal History Conference, University of Bristol))

2024: 'Jury riders and recommendations in twentieth century England and Wales' (Staff seminar, University of York)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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


Funding

2025: £1,869.20 funding to cover archival research for the project 'Reverse burdens in the archive, before and after Woolmington' (Society of Legal Scholars)

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)


Research impact and engagement

2024: appeared as a guest on the Interwar Women's Legal Landmarks podcast, discussing my work on the first women jurors

2024: appeared as a guest on the Media Law Podcast, discussing protests relating to juries

2023: interviewed by BBC Coventry and Warwick Radio on the origins of the jury system

2022: provided information, including photos, to a descendant of one of the two women who were the subject of my 2019 article in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies

2021: provided expert evidence in support of a New Zealand lawyer in disciplinary proceedings by the New Zealand Law Society; my evidence directly led to the regulator concluding they had misunderstood the law, and dropping their investigation

2020: article published in the Bristol Post, covering a full two pages, on the first women jurors after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, who were seated at Bristol quarter sessions in the summer of 1920

2020: interviewed by CNN on the covid-related backlog on criminal cases in England and Wales

2019: cited by the House of Commons library in a briefing note on the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919

2019: cited by a quarter of the states of the USA (plus Puerto Rico) in their amicus brief before the US Supreme Court

2019: discussed first women on Leicester's juries on BBC Radio Leicester

2017: quoted from in an extrajudicial speech by Lady Justice Hallett, exploring the past and future of the jury system

2016-19: research champion, First 100 Years project (women in law after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919); activities included publishing multiple blog posts and being interviewed on their podcast

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Stage Three

Evidence (LAW3016): module leader; lectures; seminars

Law and History (LAW3038): module leader; lectures; seminars (NB alternating years 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