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

Edited texts

Edited collections

Articles

Contributions to edited volumes

Entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Journal articles