Subedi Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation 2024/25 awarded to Mitchell Cleaver

The Law Faculty is pleased to announce the recipient of the Subedi Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation submitted during the 2024/25 academic year.

The Subedi Prize was established in 2019 thanks to a generous donation from Professor Surya P. Subedi QC. The prize is awarded annually to the thesis that, in the opinion of the judges, makes the most exciting original contribution to the relevant field of scholarship and is best-crafted in terms of organisation, style and presentation. 

The prize for the 2024/25 academic year is awarded to Dr Mitchell James Cleaver for his dissertation “The Equitable Lien: Credit, Security, and Priority in English Law and Economy, 1673–1925”. 

Dr Cleaver’s doctoral research examined when, how, and why courts recognise new kinds of equitable property right. Its focus was the equitable lien. Under the modern law, ‘equitable lien’ refers to a category of security interest, namely equitable charges that arise by implication or operation of law. Equitable liens confer a power to seek an order for judicial sale of an asset that would otherwise belong to another (or, where the lien affects a fund, an order for payment or distribution). If entitled to an equitable lien, a person is a secured creditor despite not having expressly bargained for such protection. In recent years, questions about equitable liens have repeatedly reached appellate courts in England and throughout the common law world. These include questions about when and why they arise in particular contexts; their priority status relative to other interests; and their historical or present-day justification. Absent from this case law and the related literature is any sustained historical inquiry into the origins of this body of law, especially its relationship to the wider phenomenon of so-called equitable property. 

Dr Cleaver’s research addressed this gap. His dissertation unearthed the historical roots of the law of equitable lien, including its central but long overlooked place in the entangled histories of the law of obligations, property, security, equity and trusts, succession, and insolvency. It explored how lawyers conceptualised, and justified, a contested law of equitable lien, and how lawyers adapted this law to various legal, social, and economic ends. Its central question was how to account historically for the unpaid vendor’s lien, which is often presented today as the paradigmatic case of an equitable lien. 

The examiners praised the dissertation as an “extremely impressive” and “highly original” piece of historical scholarship that was “deeply researched”, “closely argued”, and “very rich in detail and insights”. They commended its use of archival and manuscript records, its detailed examination of liens and credit failure in the eighteenth century, and its particularly strong argument about the origins and historical development of the unpaid vendor’s lien.

On hearing he had won the prize, Dr Cleaver said:

“I’m honoured to have won the Subedi Prize. My research would not have been possible without the support of family, friends, teachers, mentors, and colleagues over many years. I am particularly grateful to my two doctoral supervisors, Professor Joshua Getzler and Professor Ben McFarlane, and a series of exceptional academic mentors, including Professor Jamie Glister, Professor Matthew Conaglen, Dr Peter Turner, Professor Simone Degeling, Dr Jessica Hudson, Dr Andreas Televantos, Professor Liz Fisher, and Professor Matt Dyson. I’d also like to acknowledge the late Professor John Stumbles, to whom I dedicated the dissertation.”

Professor John Armour, Dean of the Faculty of Law, said:

“Many congratulations to Mitchell! This is a brilliant piece of work that richly deserves the Subedi Prize. I am delighted that, thanks to the generosity of Professor Subedi, we are able to recognise the outstanding work of our doctoral students through this prize. As always, it was hugely impressive to see so many excellent submissions. We are all fortunate that so many talented young scholars, with such original and insightful ideas, come to Oxford as part of our doctoral programme, the largest in the common law world.” 

Dr Cleaver’s research was funded by the University of Sydney (the Justice Peter Hely Scholarship); the Selden Society (the Milsom Studentship in English Legal History); Magdalen College, Oxford; and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
He has now returned to legal practice as a Senior Associate at Allens in Sydney. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, and intends to publish his research in due course.