Dr Joanna McCunn
MA (OXON), BCL, PhD, FHEA
Expertise
Joanna researches the history of English law, focusing on contracts and other kinds of legal document.
Current positions
Senior Lecturer in Law
University of Bristol Law School
Contact
Press and media
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Biography
Joanna is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol. After taking her MA (Law with Law Studies in Germany) and BCL at the University of Oxford, she worked as a research assistant at the Law Commission for England and Wales. She then embarked on her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, earning her PhD in 2019.
Research interests
Joanna’s research focuses on the historical development of English law. Her PhD thesis examined the interpretation of private legal documents in the common law courts during the early modern period. She continues to work on early modern law, and is currently investigating the influence of ideas from continental Europe on the English law of this period. Joanna is also undertaking research on the development of English contract law in the nineteenth century and, with Andrew J. Bell, is leading a comparative historical project on legal responses to intractable factual uncertainty. Joanna also writes on modern contract law.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Known Unknowns: Legal Responses to Intractable Factual Uncertainties
Principal Investigator
Role
Principal Investigator
Description
This project investigates, from a comparative historical perspective, the ways in which the law frames and responds to problems of intractable factual uncertainty.
Where our ordinary evidential rules simply cannot produce…Managing organisational unit
University of Bristol Law SchoolDates
01/09/2018 to 31/12/2025
Reading legal documents in early modern England
Principal Investigator
Description
This project explores approaches to the interpretation of legal documents in early modern England. It identifies the principles used by lawyers to understand the meaning of documents such as wills,…Managing organisational unit
University of Bristol Law SchoolDates
01/09/2017 to 31/12/2026
Publications
Recent publications
27/04/2023'An art obscured with difficult cases'
Reasons and Context in Comparative Law
Quiddities and Quillities
Religious conflict and legal interpretation in early modern England
The law and the state in states of uncertainty
Test of faith
Tottel's Journal of Professional Negligence
Teaching
Joanna teaches contract law and legal history at the University of Bristol. She also contributes to courses on legal methodology, and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate research projects.
