Legacy giving

Leaving a legacy is one of the most meaningful ways you could choose to support the Faculty of Law and our community. 

Legacy support will help safeguard the faculty as a centre of learning and research, supporting future outstanding minds to respond to the world’s most pressing challenges and emerging threats to democracy, human rights and the law.

Your impact

Whether supporting leading research, our state-of-the-art law library, or the next generation of legal minds through scholarships, gifts in wills help ensure that the faculty can continue our tradition of excellence in legal scholarship for generations to come.

Your legacy could:  

• Provide scholarship support to ensure outstanding graduate students can study on our graduate programmes
• Strengthen and diversify the Bodleian Law Library’s rich collections, ensuring our students and researchers continue to have access to the latest and highest quality resources for learning, teaching and research  

Once you have provided for your loved ones, leaving a legacy in your will is an opportunity to have a tangible impact on the future of the faculty. 

One of the first women to be awarded a law degree at Oxford University

Dr Ivy Williams endowed the Winter Williams Scholarships, in 1923, in memory of her brother after he was killed in the First World War. Her scholarships supported students studying Law, with one open to all and another reserved for women. 

Dr Williams herself was the third female student to study at Oxford, taking her BA Jurisprudence examinations in 1900 and her BCL in 1902 as a member of the Society of Oxford Home Students (now St Anne’s College). These degrees, along with her MA, were only awarded to her by the University in 1920.  

Dr Williams' gift was a vision for what the faculty, and the legal profession more widely, could be: a place where women were able to contribute to the study and practice of the law on an equal footing. 

It was a bold vision at a time when women had only recently secured the right to be awarded degrees, let alone enter the legal profession. Dr Williams was forging this path herself: in 1922 she became the first woman to qualify at the bar of England and Wales. Through her gift to the faculty, she made sure this journey would be smoother for the women following in her footsteps.   

Dr Williams’ gift exemplifies the opportunity philanthropy offers us: to invest in the lives and futures of those who will come after.

Contact us

Through a gift in your will, you can help enable future generations of legal scholars to learn, question, and lead. 

Contact our Development and Alumni Engagement team to start a conversation. 

Leaving a gift to a charity can help significantly reduce the inheritance tax that might be due on your estate (if your estate is in the UK). You may qualify to pay inheritance tax at a reduced rate of 36% if you leave at least 10% of your net estate to charity.