04 July 2019

New appointment to the Professorship of English Law

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Ben McFarlane to the Professorship of English Law. Professor McFarlane will join us in October 2019 and will be a Fellow of St John’s College.

Professor McFarlane’s research focusses on the interaction of the law of property and the law of obligations, and on the law of England and other common law jurisdictions. He is particularly interested in the extent to which coherent principles can be extracted from the great mass of judicial decisions that make up the common law, and in the application of those principles in commercial and other contexts. He has explored this theme in books such as The Structure of Property Law and The Law of Proprietary Estoppel, is a co-author of leading textbooks in the areas of land law and of trusts, and contributes five chapters to Snell’s Equity. He is a co-editor of the recently published Modern Studies in Property Law: Volume X and is an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association and of the Property Bar Association.

He is currently Professor of Law at University College London, a post he has held since July 2012, and he has taught a wide range of subjects at UCL including Property Law I and II, International and Commercial Trusts Law, Commercial Law, and Unjust Enrichment, as well as seminars on the writing of Hohfeld. In Oxford, he was previously a Reader in Property Law and Trusts, and a Fellow of Trinity College and of St Peter’s College, as well as Penningtons Student in Law at Christ Church. He holds visiting appointments at the University of Paris II and at Melbourne Law School, where he is a Senior Fellow. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2010.