Happy 90th Birthday to former Kent law academic Belinda Meteyard!

Kent Law School is delighted to send warmest 90th birthday wishes to former Kent law academic Belinda Meteyard.

Belinda, who celebrated her 90th birthday last week, taught law at the University of Kent in the 1970s and 1980s and emerged as an influential figure in the field of feminist legal scholarship.

Together with fellow Kent Law School colleagues Alan Thomson and Wade Mansell, Belinda co-authored A Critical Introduction to Law (Routledge, 1995) This textbook, now in its fourth edition (edited by KLS Emeritus Professor Wade Mansell) sprang from an early ‘Introduction to Law’ course taught at the University. The ‘Intro to Law’ course was the cornerstone of Kent’s teaching in the early years. It immersed first year students in critical engagement with law but was predominantly written and taught by male academics. It was Belinda that first introduced (and delivered) two weeks of teaching on gender to the course.

Belinda also helped establish Feminist Legal Studies, the first UK peer-reviewed, scholarly journal to focus specifically on feminist legal scholarship. Belinda is pictured below (second from left) at the launch meeting of the Feminist Legal Studies Editorial Board, together with (from l-r) Maria Drakopoulou, Joanne Conaghan, Joanne Scott, Sarah Carter and Anne Bottomley. The first issue of Feminist Legal Studies was published in March 1993 at Kent. This ground-breaking journal helped nurture the field of feminist legal studies both in the UK and internationally.

In an article written for KLS50, a book celebrating Kent Law School’s 50th anniversary in 2019, Emeritus Reader Anne Bottomley remembers meeting Belinda for the first time in 1981.

“I heard Belinda give her paper on the history of marriage and illegitimacy, chaired by Wade Mansell, in a packed-room with an appreciative audience. Either that evening or the following one, Belinda and I (with the late and still missed Vicky Fisher, from Leicester), found ourselves in a strangely empty Eliot bar. We found out later that everyone else (that is, the male majority attending the conference), had moved elsewhere to watch a football match – which gave us the space, that evening, to talk about feminism and the role women were given/taking up in law schools and academic conferences (including of the radical sort). We decided that we would, henceforth, meet as a women’s group, a Women’s Caucus, to network and develop a critical presence for women and for feminism in any critical law initiative.”

Happy Birthday Belinda from all of us at KLS!