Vivien Law

Vivien Anne Law, Lady Shackleton, FBA (1954–2002) was a British linguist and academic, who specialised in grammar. Over her lifetime, she "acquired a grammatical knowledge of over a hundred languages". She spent all her academic career at the University of Cambridge; she was a lecturer in the history of linguistics from 1984 to 1998, and Reader in the History of Linguistic Thought from 1998 to her death on 2002. She was also a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge from 1978 to 1980, a senior research fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1980 to 1984, teaching fellow at Sidney Sussex College from 1984 to 1997, and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1997 to 2002.

In 1986, Law married Nicholas John Shackleton, a noted geologist and paleoclimatologist. They did not have any children. Upon his knighthood in 1998, she became Lady Shackleton.

In 1999, Law was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.

• Law, Vivien (1987). The Insular Latin grammarians. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-0851151472. 
• Law, Vivien, ed. (1993). History of Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1556193668. 
• Law, Vivien (1995). The morality of medieval grammar: Virgilius Maro Grammaticus and the Seventh Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521471138. 
• Law, Vivien; Hüllen, Werner, eds. (1996). Linguists and Their Diversions: A Festschrift for R. H. Robins on his 75th Birthday. Münster: Nodus. ISBN 3-89323-453-5. 
• Law, Vivien (1997). Grammar and grammarians in the early Middle Ages. London: Longman. ISBN 978-0582212947. 
• Law, Vivien (2003). The history of linguistics in Europe from Plato to 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521563154.