Jaqueline Bemmer is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna and a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at The Europe Center. She is a Celticist, historian and legal scholar, specializing in early medieval Irish law as well as late Roman law. She earned her DPhil in History from the University of Oxford producing the first thesis on the law of pledging in early medieval Ireland, focused around the legal tract Bretha im Ḟuillemu Gell (Judgements on Pledge Interests). 

Her current monograph: ‘Poena: conceptions of pain and suffering in late Roman legal sources’ deals with a critical period of transition and multi-normativity in European legal history situated at the threshold between the fading Roman Empire in the West and the rise of Christendom and small Germanic kingdoms in early medieval Europe, examining normative approaches to punishment, criminal procedure and penal policies. She is hosted by Prof. Walter Scheidel.

Jaqueline Bemmer has taught Irish, Welsh and Roman law as well as Latin legal terminology. She is a member of The Royal Historical Society and the Irish Legal History Society, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Scots Law, University of Aberdeen. She is articles editor for the Journal of the European Society for Comparative Legal History and has most recently been selected for participation in the Wallace Johnson Program at The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.