ris de Freitas Brazao was a legal luminary who shattered the profession’s glass ceiling in the Caribbean. She had the distinction of being the first woman barrister-at-law in the Commonwealth Caribbean.
It is 100 years since Iris first graduated from the University of Oxford, a remarkable achievement to be celebrated. Matriculating in 1923 for the Bachelor of Arts, her courses for the BA included Roman Law, the English Legal System, Constitutional Law and Legal History, International Law and Roman-Dutch Law. Knowledge of Roman Dutch-Law was particularly important as this served as the precedence for many rulings in her home country of British Guiana (now Guyana). Significantly, Iris was taught by Dr Ivy Williams, the first woman to be called to the bar in England and a professor at St Anne’s College at Oxford. Iris was originally enrolled as a Society of Oxford Home-Student (now St Anne’s College). Notably, Iris’s 1925 graduation occurred 10 years before Dr Merze Tate, who in 1935 became the first African-American woman to graduate from Oxford.
Iris continued her studies at Oxford and was awarded an academic scholarship. In 1926, she graduated once again, this time with a postgraduate qualification, the Bachelor of Civil Law.
Before Oxford, Iris studied briefly at the University of Toronto in 1918, and at Aberystwyth University, Wales, from 1919 where she later graduated with both a BA (1922) and an LLB (1927). Her English law professor at Aberystwyth University (then University College of Wales (UCW)) was T. Arthur Levi, who was an Oxford graduate. He noted in June 1923 that: ‘Iris has proved one of the best law students we have ever had in the college.’ Iris was elected president of the UCW Women’s Sectional Council and vice president of the Wales Students’ Representative Council from 1922 to 1923. Her academic legal studies concluded in 1929 when she was called to the bar at the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.
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