Dr Alice Krzanich

Biography

Dr Alice Krzanich joined the university in July 2022 as a Lecturer in Law and Legal History. She teaches across a range of areas including law and gender, private law, and legal history. Her research interests include historical contract law relating to domestic service as well as (more recently) historical recognition of hurt feelings in Scots law. She is fascinated by law’s interaction with socio-economic factors such as gender and class, which forms a central theme in all of her research.

Alice holds a PhD in law from the University of Edinburgh, having graduated in Summer 2022. Prior to that Alice completed an LLM at the University of Cambridge. She undertook her undergraduate studies in her home country of New Zealand, completing a conjoint degree programme of BA/LLB (Hons) at the University of Auckland. Alice majored in History for her BA degree and it was in her undergraduate years that she first discovered a passion for legal history.

Alice also worked in various legal jobs before commencing postgraduate studies, having being admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand in 2011. First she was a judges’ clerk at the NZ Court of Appeal, helping the judiciary write judgments, before working at a specialist public law firm for two years. She then worked as a junior barrister for a QC, assisting with both criminal and civil litigation, before working for a short period as an in-house legal consultant for an aviation recruitment company. This varied work experience gave Alice insight into multiple areas of law and the skills necessary to work in the legal sector.

Research Overview

Alice recently completed a PhD titled 'Female Domestic Servants and the Law: An Analysis of Gender, Class and the Contract of Service in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland', which looked at the contract law that applied to female domestic servants in Scotland during the period c 1800 to 1850. She sought not only to uncover the legal doctrine relating to this body of law but to also analyse the influence of class and gender upon it.

More recently Alice has completed research into recognition of hurt feelings in Scots private law from 1750 to the present.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2958-6530

Teaching Responsibilities

Alice teaches in the areas of private law, legal history, and law and gender.