Emily Kadens Receives Prestigious Visiting Fellowship at Oxford’s All Souls College

Emily Kadens, Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor of Law, has been awarded a prestigious Visiting Fellowship for the 2026-2027 academic year at the University of Oxford’s All Souls College. The College is primarily an academic research institution with particular strengths in the humanities and social and theoretical sciences and an outstanding library. It also has strong ties to public life. It is also unique among the Oxford colleges as a dedicated scholarly institution. Although its Fellows may be involved in teaching and supervision of research, there are no undergraduate members.

All Souls only invites a small group of visiting fellows every term. In making its final choice, the College gives weight to the intellectual quality, to the interest and feasibility of the research project, and to the benefit of carrying it out in Oxford. The College also aims to create a broad disciplinary mix of Visiting Fellows.

While in residence at All Souls, Professor Kadens will be conducting research on her book Deceitful Dealings: Trust and Fraud in English Commerce, 1540–1640, which will examine fraudulent business practices in early modern England, and the public and private responses to them. “People assume fraud is a modern phenomenon, but it’s not,” says Kadens. “Cheating is perennial – people have committed fraud throughout history, but its occurrence prior to the 18^th century hasn’t actually been studied.”

The book will focus on new findings from English equity court records, used a fully written procedure and thus provide abundant evidence for historians. Professor Kadens’s AI transcription model, dubbed “Egerton,” has successfully generated transcripts of thousands of pages of these core documents, originally composed in a difficult script called secretary hand, for analysis. “What’s unique about these documents is witness testimony,” says Kadens. “You have records of not only how the fraud occurred but also how people felt about it. You can really reconstruct what happened, as well as theoretical findings about the role of trust and reputation during this time.”

The Visiting Fellowship at All Souls will provide a valuable opportunity to examine these primary source documents and take advantage of numerous relevant resources at Oxford, such as the Global History of Capitalism project housed within the Oxford Centre for Global History. However, for Kadens, “What I’m actually looking most forward to is the people. Historians, economists, economic historians, people in the law faculty…there’s even someone in computer science I’m starting a collaboration with to build an AI research platform. There’s going to be a lot of interesting people to talk to and get feedback from.” 

Professor Kadens is an award-winning legal historian with a particular focus on the medieval and early modern history of commercial law and practice. She has a JD from the University of Chicago and a PhD in medieval history from Princeton. In addition to her current research, she has also written on custom, the concept of the law merchant, and the early history of English bankruptcy. She is currently leading a new project studying how to leverage AI to analyze witness testimony from Early Modern English courts. As an administrator at Northwestern Pritzker Law, Kadens has been involved with creating, among other initiatives, the Perspective Project—a dialogue across difference program for incoming law students; the Northwestern Summer Law Academy—a pipeline program for college students; and the Orientation to Law program for Northwestern PhD Students. Kadens has won the Best 1L Professor award three times, the Childres Award for most outstanding teacher, and has been selected by the graduating class to give the ceremonial Last Lecture.