06 April 2011

Public Lecture on “The Fiction of a Constructive Trust”

Professor William Swadling, one of the foremost authority on Property Law in the United Kingdom, has agreed to address STEP and IFA members on Friday 08 April 2009 at the Bar Council House, 4th Floor Maxcity Building, Pope Hennessy Street Port Louis.

Professor Swadling , MA (Oxon), LLM (Lond) is the Director of Graduate Studies (Taught Courses) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Oxford, a Reader in the Law of Property, and the Senior Law Fellow at Brasenose College. He chairs the faculty's teaching groups in Restitution and Personal Property. Before coming to Oxford, he held posts at a number of other universities, including University College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the editor of a number of books, including The Quistclose Trust: Critical Essays. He is particularly interested in the intersection between trusts/property and restitution, and a number of his articles on this topic have been cited in the English courts, most notably in Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale v Islington LBC [1996] AC 669. He is a contributor to Halsbury's Laws of England (4th ed, reissue), and wrote the section entitled 'Property' in Burrows (ed), English Private Law (2nd ed, 2007). He is a founding editor of the Restitution Law Review and has held visiting professorships at the University of Hamburg, Seoul National University, the National University of Singapore, University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), and the University of Leuven. He is an academic associate at 3-4 South Square, Gray's Inn, London, a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and an elected member of the American Law Institute.

The title of Professor Swadling’s talk shall be “The Fiction of a Constructive Trust”.

The Agenda for Friday’s talks shall be as follows:

17:30-18:00 Arrival, Collation and Networking

18:00-18:15 Welcome

18:15-19:00 Talk by Professor Swadling

19:00-19.30 Questions

To book a seat, please contact Prisca Isabelle on 213 1111. Seats are limited and you are advised to register early.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The orthodox position in English law is that the constructive trust is as much a trust as the express trust; the only difference being that it is ‘constructed’ by the court. As a consequence, the constructive trustee has all the duties of a trustee, and the constructive beneficiary has all the benefits he would have as the beneficiary of an express trust. The argument presented here is that that view is false; that the constructive trust is not a trust but a fiction. The reality is that the language masks nothing more than two types of court order: (i) that the defendant pay a sum of money to the claimant; and (ii) that the defendant convey a particular right to the claimant. Only once the fictitious nature of the ‘trust’ is realized can any coherent analysis of the incidence of such orders be made.