Dr Guido Rossi awarded 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize
Fri 16 October 2020
The Edinburgh Law School is delighted to announce that Dr Guido Rossi has been awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of his ground-breaking research on comparative legal history.
Dr Rossi will use the prize to pursue a new project exploring fundamental questions around the development of English commerce and commercial law, and its relationship with Europe. Having discovered a new archive of commercial documentation, Dr Rossi will reconstruct sixteenth century English commercial law and practices, showing their profound similarity with contemporary commercial practices and rules found in Continental Europe. This will have a transformative impact on legal scholarship, as it will lead to completely reconsidering the development of commercial law in England, and its place within Europe.
The research will also provide a trove of new data and shed light on the life and work of English merchants, of foreign merchants in England, and of mercantile networks across England during the Elizabethan period.
Philip Leverhulme Prizes are awarded annually to recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising.
Dr Rossi has so far written two monographs. The first, Insurance in Elizabethan England: The London Code (published by Cambridge University Press in 2016), is based on original archival research and provides significant new insights in the development of early modern insurance. The second, Representation and Ostensible Authority in Medieval Learned Law (published in the legal history series of the Max-Planck Institute of Frankfurt in 2019), is an in-depth study of late medieval concept of legal representation and the validity of acts done without it, ranging from the excommunication levied by a secretly heretical bishop to the decisions issued by a judge whose appointment was void.
Learn more about Dr Rossi’s research
I am delighted to receive such a prestigious prize, which will provide an invaluable support for my research. I am deeply conscious that this would have never happened without the staunch support, continuous encouragement and patient help of many colleagues. I owe much to the exceptional community that is Edinburgh Law School.