Lionel Smith elected Fellow of the British Academy
We are delighted to announce that Lionel Smith, Professor of Comparative Law, has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Commenting on this honour he said: ‘At Oxford and other universities, I have been most fortunate in benefiting from an excellent education, in having outstanding students, and in working with brilliant and generous colleagues. All these things are essential to being a successful scholar.’
Professor Smith took up his post as Professor of Comparative Law at Oxford at the start of Michaelmas Term 2024. Previously he was Downing Professor of the Laws of England and Director of the Cambridge Private Law Centre at the University of Cambridge.
His research interests encompass all aspects of fundamental comparative private law. His comparative work focuses particularly on trusts, succession, restitution, and the philosophical foundations of private law.
Prior to his tenure in Cambridge, Professor Smith spent 22 years at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where he was Sir William C Macdonald Professor and, before that, James McGill Professor and Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. He holds degrees from the Universities of Toronto, Western Ontario, Cambridge, Oxford and Montreal. In 2021, he was awarded a Doctorate of Civil Law from the University of Oxford.
He is the author of The Law of Tracing (OUP 1997) and The Law of Loyalty (OUP 2023), and editor or co-editor of many other books and special issues of law journals, including Commercial Trusts in European Private Law (CUP 2005; paperback 2009); Re-imagining the Trust: Trusts in Civil Law (CUP 2012; Chinese translation, Law Press China 2021); The Worlds of the Trust (CUP 2013) and La fiducie en droit civil (a special issue ((2013) 58:4) of the McGill Law Journal. He has written over a hundred articles and notes published in journals all over the world.
Lionel is one of the 58 academics from UK universities who have been elected as Fellows of the British Academy this year. These new Fellows of the British Academy join a community of over 1800 of the leading minds that make up the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.