Lund University Faculty of Law has awarded Professor of Legal History Mia Korpiola an Honorary Doctorate.
Mia Korpiola has worked as a professor at the University of Turku Faculty of Law since 2014. She is a legal historian with an exceptionally broad range of expertise and has devoted herself to fields that have not previously been highlighted in research, not least by conducting extensive archival research, Lund University emphasizes.
Her list of publications is extensive and spans many different fields of research, from early medieval legislation to regulations on bicycles in the late 19th century. Her research covers not only the development of law in Sweden and Finland, but also the rest of the Nordic region and Europe.
Korpiola’s research has primarily focused on family law, canon law, legal professions, legal literacy (the ability to understand, interpret and use the law in everyday life) and the transfer of legal norms between legal systems. Korpiola has repeatedly addressed the role of women in history, for example by highlighting new perspectives on medieval marriage law, women’s use of legal strategies in inheritance law contexts during the Middle Ages and early modern times, and how men and women in the Middle Ages were sentenced to different punishments depending on their gender.
Korpiola has collaborated with legal historians in Lund on several research projects over the past 25 years. She was the project leader when legal historians from Lund and Helsinki commemorated the 400 years anniversary of the Svea Court of Appeal in 2014. Together with Elsa Trolle Önnerfors, Korpiola has carried out pioneering work on female lawyers in history and their path to work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Korpiola participates in both Nordic and wider international networks in legal history. She has held important positions within the European Society for Comparative Legal History.
