Wilfrid Prest, AM (born 1940) is a historian, specialising in legal history, who is professor emeritus at the University of Adelaide. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia , and Queen's College, University of Melbourne, and a member of the Council of the Selden Society, London.
He has published five sole-author books, three scholarly textual editions, and twelve edited collections, together with numerous journal articles and entries in works of reference.
Life
Born in Melbourne, Australia, of English parents and educated at schools in Melbourne, York and Cambridge, Prest read history at the University of Melbourne, then studied as a Rhodes Scholar (Victoria and New College, 1962) for his doctorate at the University of Oxford. After six months as a publishing trainee in London, he became a lecturer in history at the University of Adelaide in 1966. He subsequently spent two years (1969–71) as assistant professor at The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, before returning to the University of Adelaide, where he remained a member of the history department until July 2002. Between 1978 and 1985, he was also chairman of the Board of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
In 2002 Prest resigned his personal chair in History to take up an Australian Research Council Australian Professorial Fellowship; he moved to the Law School in 2003, and subsequently held his fellowship as a joint appointment between Law and History, while preparing a biography of William Blackstone. From 2010 to 2015, he oversaw as general editor the preparation of a new variorum edition of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in four volumes from 1765 to 1769. He is currently working on volume nine (1689–1760) of the Oxford History of the Laws of England with his Adelaide colleague David Lemmings and Mike Macnair of the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.
In the 2021 Australia Day Honours list, Prest was awarded Member (AM) in the General Division for significant service to tertiary education and to the law and legal history.
Published works
Books
Monographs
The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (London: Longman; Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972) The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1991) Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1998) William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 2012) Blackstone as a Barrister (London: Selden Society, 2010)
Edited texts
The Diary of Sir Richard Hutton, Justice of Common Pleas 1617–1639, with Related Documents (London: Selden Society, 1991) The Letters of Sir William Blackstone, 1743–1780 (London: Selden Society, 2006) (with David Lemmings, Simon Stern, Thomas Gallanis and Ruth Paley), The Oxford Blackstone; a variorum edition of William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Edited collections
Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America (London: Croom Helm, 1981; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981) The Professions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987) John Bray: Law, Letters, Life (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1997) British Studies into the 21st Century: Perspectives and Practices (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1999) (with Graham Tulloch) Scatterlings of Empire (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2001) (Journal of Australian Studies, no. 68) (with Kerrie Round and Carol Susan Fort), The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001) (with Sharyn Roach-Anleu) Litigation Past and Present (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2003) Blackstone and his Commentaries: Biography, History and Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009) (with Graeme Davison and Pat Jalland) Body and Mind: Historical Essays in Honour of F. B. Smith (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009) Pasts Present: History at Australia's Third University (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2014) Re-interpreting Blackstone's Commentaries: A Seminal Text in National and International Contexts (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014) (with Anthony Page), Blackstone and his Critics (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018)