Dr Victoria Barnes
Honorary Reader - Law School

Summary

Dr Victoria Barnes is Reader in Commercial Law.  She serves as Director of Research.  Her research examines contract, commercial and corporate law from transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives.  She unpicks pivotal historic events, such as landmark cases, and places them in context.  Her work traces the way organisations, legal principles and doctrines have developed through time.  She focusses often on the history of the banking and financial industry and its regulation.  Global actors, such as judges, lawyers, and other influential figures, including CEOs, feature heavily in her work as catalysts for socio-legal change.  Her work has an empirical bent, especially with its emphasis on quantification and quantitative methods.  She has published around 50 journal articles and book chapters on these themes. 

Victoria is co-editor of Business History (Taylor and Francis), the flagship journal for UK & Europe recognised for its quality and rigour, ranked 4/4* by the 2021 Academic Journal Guide (formerly Association of Business School list).  She co-edits a new book series on "Global Studies Commercial and Financial Law" (Edinburgh University Press).  It brings together scholarship from around the world about multinational enterprises, sales law, agency and trade law.  She serves as the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Legal History (Taylor and Francis), which is the only British journal concerned solely with legal history.  She has benefitted from visiting, honorary or guest positions, holding roles, for example, at the London School of Economics, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Exeter.  Before joining Brunel, she worked at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt and Georgetown University in Washington DC.  

Victoria is involved in several different scholarly communties.  This year, Victoria hosts the Society of Legal Scholars’ Annual Seminar on "the Origins of Company Law", the WG Hart Workshop on "Theorists in Company Law", and the Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Seminar on "Fantasty Legal Exhibitions".  She set up the Minerva LAW Network, which invites women judges, law commissioners, professional trainers and partners in law firms, to give career advice to international lawyers and improve the employability of PhD candidates and ECRs in fields where women are still underrepresented. She runs the "Law, History and Visual Culture Seminar Series", which has thus far hosted around 50 speakers analysing paintings, portraits, comics, films and objects at the intersection between law and history. She also founded the "Global Corporate Law Seminar Series", which gathers those researching company law from around the world to exchange ideas about corporate regulation.  She also serves as a Trustee for the Business History Conference, which was founded in 1954 in the United States to foster research on the environment in which enterprises operate in.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Reading

Responsibility

• Co-editor of Business History
• Book series editor for Global Studies in Commercial and Financial Law
• Book review editor of the Journal of Legal History
• Leader of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law's Sub-group on Women and Gender in the Legal Profession
• Organiser of the Global Corporate Law Seminar Series
• Organsing committee of the Minerva LAW Network
• Organiser of the Law, History and Visual Culture Seminar Series
• Trustee of the Business History Conference