Jeffrey Hackney
Emeritus Fellow in Law and Keeper of the Archives for Wadham College
Biography
Jeffrey Hackney came to Wadham as a law student in 1959. He left in 1962 to pursue historical studies at UCL but returned in 1963 to do the BCL. He was a Tutorial Fellow in law at St Edmund Hall from 1964-76 and was Librarian and Senior Tutor. He returned to Wadham as Tutorial Fellow in Law in 1976.
On his return to Wadham, Jeffrey embarked on a series of posts for the University, first in the Law Faculty and then as part of the central team where he was amongst other things Chairman of the General Board and the Libraries Board and of the Disciplinary Court. As Keeper of the Archives he reformed the way the University administered its non-current papers and was for 17 years Chairman of the Curators of the Sheldonian Theatre, seeing through a major restoration of the ceiling and of the original Wren decorative scheme. Now an Emeritus Fellow at Wadham and St Edmund Hall, he presently holds one University office, Clerk of the Market, which happily seems to be immune to the Employer Justified Retirement Age.
He has taught at universities in North America and on the mainland. He was a co-founder of a law reporting company which pioneered the notion of same-day law reporting and for many years, in conjunction with the National Judicial College, organised residential seminars for senior American judges seeking to learn more about the British system.
His teaching and research interests, formerly in property law and legal history, are now limited to Roman law and he is becoming obsessed by the debt which the Common law owes to the Civilian tradition. He is also exploring whether useful comparative data can be assembled on the ways in which different legal systems offer fiscal inducement to charitable donors.