Professor of Law and Legal History

St Hugh’s College Oxford OX2 6LE
Office at 82 Woodstock Road
Telephone: 01865 274932

Email: joshua.getzler@law.ox.ac.uk
Law Faculty Webpage: Joshua Getzler 
Oxford Law Faculty: http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/

My main interests are in property, equity and trusts both in their historical dimensions and in modern-day practice. I also work in economic history and law-and-economics traditions.

I have always studied law and history side by side. At the Australian National University I took joint degrees, reading medieval and early modern history and modern economic history, and in law emphasising private law, especially trusts, equity, restitution and contract. I was admitted as a solicitor in New South Wales in 1989, and then came to Oxford, reading for my doctorate in legal history at Balliol College and Nuffield College. I joined St Hugh’s College as a tutor and fellow in law in 1993. In 2007 I was appointed as conjoint professor of law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. In 2012 I will serve as Bok Visiting International Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Apart from academic and occasional policy work, I have served as legal counsel advising on issues including trusts, fiduciaries, corporate insolvency, and jurisdiction for judicial review. In today's multi-jurisdictional and entangled world, legal conflict often raises issues that university lawyers can help to unravel; and I am constantly surprised at how seemingly esoteric historical law can turn out to be directly relevant to modern legal affairs.

I presently lecture in Trusts, History of English Law, and Roman Law in the BA course. In College, I tutor chiefly in Trusts, Roman Law, and Contract. I teach in the BCL/MJur course on Advanced Property and Trusts. I also teach classes in modern legal and economic history, and have a number of research students in both modern and historical subjects. I have supervised dissertations at masters and doctoral level in law (particularly equity and trusts), in legal history, and in economic and constitutional history, and welcome inquiries regarding fresh dissertation projects.

In my historical research, I have published on property rights and land and water use, Roman and civilian property concepts, equity jurisdiction, trusts, fiduciaries, torts, and business entities. I have recently commenced a new project studying the role of the lord chancellors in law and politics before the Great Reform Act, from Macclesfield and King through to Hardwicke and Eldon, and using archival sources in the UK and US. In modern law I have written on the nature of equity, the typology of trustees’ and fiduciaries’ duties and their relationship to common law duties, and also on property theory and on policy and doctrinal questions in the regulation of pooled investment. My current work focuses on the law, economics and history of fiduciary asset management, plural ownerships and corporate form, investigating the interplay of capital market structure and legal doctrine. This has led me into collaboration with the Oxford Financial Research Centre, and the Said Business School at Oxford, including work on the new Oxford Masters degree in Law and Finance.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

A History of Water Rights at Common Law (Oxford Studies in Modern Legal History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, paperback edition 2006). 448 pp. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199207602.do
Winner of the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, 2005 (awarded by the Society of Legal Scholars).

Rationalizing Property, Equity and Trusts: Essays in Honour of Edward Burn (ed, LexisNexis Butterworths, London, 2003). 382 pp.

Properties of Law: Essays in Honour of Jim Harris (ed with Timothy Endicott and Edwin Peel, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). 416 pp.

Company Charges: Spectrum and Beyond (ed with Jennifer Payne, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). 336 pp.

Judges and Judging in the History of the Common Law and Civil Law (ed with Paul Brand, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012). 368 pp.

Articles, chapters and notes

‘Unconscionable Conduct and Unjust Enrichment as Grounds for Judicial Intervention’ (1990) 16 Monash University Law Review 283-326.

‘Theories of Property and Economic Development’ (1996) 26:4 Journal of Interdisciplinary History 639-669, reprinted in JW Harris, ed, Property Problems: From Genes to Pension Funds (Kluwer, The Hague and London, 1997) 193-206.

‘Professionals As Competing Monopolists’ in PBH Birks, ed, Wrongs and Remedies in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996) 141-152.

‘Is Pragmatism the End of Ideology?’ (1997) 17 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 525-536.

‘Judges and Hunters: Law and Economic Conflict in the English Countryside, 1800-60’ in C Brooks and M Lobban, eds, Communities and Courts in Britain 1150-1900 (Hambledon Press, London, 1997) 199-228.

‘Patterns of Fusion’ in PBH Birks, ed, The Classification of Obligations (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997) 157-192.

‘Roman Ideas of Landownership’ in S Bright and J Dewar, eds, Land Law: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998) 81-106.

‘The Fate of the Civil Jury in Late Victorian England: Malicious Prosecution as a Test Case’ in GR Rubin and K O’Donovan, eds, Human Rights and Legal History: Essays for Brian Simpson (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) 205-224, revised and reprinted in JW Cairns and G McLeod, eds, ‘The Dearest Birth Right of the People of England’: The Jury in the History of the Common Law (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2002) 217-237.

‘Equitable Compensation and the Regulation of Fiduciary Relationships’ in PBH Birks and FD Rose, eds, Restitution and Equity Vol. 1: Resulting Trusts and Equitable Compensation (Mansfield Press/LLP, London, 2000) 235-257.

‘Sir Cresswell Cresswell’ in C Matthew & B Harrison, eds, The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004).

‘Sir Charles Crompton’ in C Matthew & B Harrison, eds, The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004).

‘Sir John Jervis’ in C Matthew & B Harrison, eds, The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004).

‘Edward Sugden, Baron St. Leonards’ in C Matthew & B Harrison, eds, The New Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004).

‘Unclean Hands and the Doctrine of Jus Tertii’ (2001) 117 Law Quarterly Review 565-570.

‘Duty of Care’ in PBH Birks and A Pretto, eds, Breach of Trust (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2002) 41-74.

‘Equity’ in HM Kritzer, ed, Legal Systems of the World: A Political, Social and Cultural Encyclopaedia (Santa Barbara, 2002) ii, 495-498.

Legislative incursions into modern trusts doctrine in England: The Trustee Act 2000 and the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 (2002) 2:1 Global Jurist Topics §2.

‘Roman and English Prescription for Incorporeal Property’ in J Getzler, ed, Rationalizing Property, Equity and Trusts: Essays in Honour of Edward Burn (LexisNexis Butterworths, London, 2003) 281-323.

‘Law, History and the Social Sciences: Intellectual Traditions of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Europe’ in M Lobban and A Lewis, eds, Law and History, Current Legal Issues, Vol. 6 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003) 215-263.

‘Forfeiture for Breach of a Time Condition’ (2004) 120 Law Quarterly Review 203-208.

Chancery Reform and Law Reform (2004) 22 Law and History Review 601-608.

The Firm as an Entity before the Companies Acts (with Mike Macnair) in P Brand, K Costello and WN Osborough, eds, Adventures of the Law: Proceedings of the Sixteenth British Legal History Conference, Dublin, 2003 (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005) 267-288.

‘Property, Personality and Violence’ in T Endicott, J Getzler, and E Peel, eds, Properties of Law: Essays in Honour of James W Harris (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) 246-73; revised as Use of Force in Protecting Property (2005) 7 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 243-278.

‘Am I My Beneficiary’s Keeper? Fusion and Loss-Based Fiduciary Remedies’ in S Degeling and J Edelman, eds, Equity in Commercial Law (Thomson/LBC, Sydney, 2005) 239-277.

‘Inconsistent Fiduciary Duties and Implied Consent’ (2006) 122 Law Quarterly Review 1-8.

‘Rumford Market and the Genesis of Fiduciary Obligations’ in A Burrows and A Rodger, eds, Mapping the Law: Essays in Honour of Peter Birks (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) 577-598.

'The Role of Security over Future and Circulating Capital: Evidence from the British Economy circa 1850-1920' in J Getzler and J Payne, eds, Company Charges: Spectrum and Beyond (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) 227-251.

'ASIC v Citigroup: Bankers’ Conflict of Interest and the Contractual Exclusion of Fiduciary Duties' (2007) 2 Journal of Equity 62-70.

'Excluding Fiduciary Duties: The Problem of Investment Banks' (2008) 124 Law Quarterly Review 15-21.

'Denning, Alfred Thompson’, in P Cane and J Conaghan, eds, New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) 306.

‘Historical Research in Law’, in P Cane and J Conaghan, eds, New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) 534-536.

‘Keech v Sandford’, in P Cane and J Conaghan, eds, New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) 666-667.

‘Water Law', in P Cane and J Conaghan, eds, New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) 1236.

'Easements' in SN Katz, chief ed, The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford University Press, New York, 2009).

'Environment Law: English Common Law' in SN Katz, chief ed, The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford University Press, New York, 2009).

'Company Law: English Common Law' in SN Katz, chief ed, The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford University Press, New York, 2009).

'Quantum Meruit, Estoppel, and the Primacy of Contract' (2009) 125 Law Quarterly Review 196-209.

Plural Ownership, Funds, and the Aggregation of Wills (2009) 10 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 241-270.

Transplantation and Mutation in Anglo-American Trust Law (2009) 10 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 355-387.

'Fiduciary investment in the shadow of financial crisis: Was Lord Eldon right?' (2009) 3 Journal of Equity 219-250.

Richard Epstein, Strict Liability, and the History of Torts (2010) 3 Journal of Tort Law §3.

'"As If." Accountability and Counterfactual Trust' (2011) 91 Boston University Law Review 931-948

‘Assignment of Future Property and Preferences’ in J Glister and P Ridge (eds), Fault Lines in Equity (Hart Publishing, Oxford, forthcoming 2012)

‘Morice v. Bishop of Durham’ in C Mitchell and P Mitchell (eds), Landmark Cases in Equity (Hart Publishing, Oxford, forthcoming 2012)