Gold Medal for Best Overall Article 2025

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The Gold Medal for Best Overall Article was awarded to Georgia Stanley for her article 'Trials and Tribulations: The Barriers to Accessing Rape Trial Transcripts for Rape Myth Analysis in Northern Ireland, England, and Wales' [2025] 24 COLR 1

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This article discusses the methodological process behind an ongoing piece of academic legal research investigating rape myth narratives in courtroom discourse. It emphasises the rich analytical value of court transcripts as a qualitative tool for decoding and elucidating the covert rape mythology that hides behind the language of defence barrister discourse under the disguise of relevant facts. However, as explored in this article, the obtainment of redacted rape trial transcripts in Northern Ireland, England, and Wales is an arduous and complex task due to various hurdles serving as direct impediments to accessing redacted transcripts that are difficult to surmount. Accordingly, this article calls attention to this relatively unexamined area of criminal justice access by outlining the various steps and findings of the court transcript request process in these jurisdictions, before providing and a series of recommendations on how to rectify this issue going forward.

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