This text is a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law. It aims to answer the question, “what can the civil law tradition tell us about the New Private Law?” It seeks to do this by offering one civilian’s perspective on private law, on U.S. private law, and on the...

This case note criticizes the decision of the Court of Appeal for England and Wales in FHR European Ventures LLP v Mankarious [2013] EWCA Civ 17 and argues for a new understanding of the no-profit rule in fiduciary law. The note was cited in the decision of the UK Supreme Court when it allowed...

The most prominent features of the landscape of fiduciary law are the no-conflict and no-profit rules. This paper aims to clarify the differences between existing accounts of these rules, and to propose my own argument for their justification. It first distinguishes between arguments that they...

It has become an orthodoxy in some quarters that fiduciary duties are only proscriptive, forbidding certain actions, and never prescriptive, requiring positive action. I argue that this is a misunderstanding. The argument begins by attempting to explain how this orthodoxy arose, and then by...

In the law of unjust enrichment, the question when a plaintiff should have access to proprietary remedies is one of the most controversial issues. This paper attempts to expose the philosophical and historical foundations of the most important category of proprietary remedies; namely, trusts...

In this paper the author explores a number of misapprehensions concerning common law trusts, under three headings. The first is “misusing trusts,” in which he describes situations in which a failure to appreciate the juridical nature of the trust relationship can lead to the breakdown of...