Academic Staff
Professor Michael Tilbury
Kerry Holdings Professor in Private Law
| HKU ResearcherPage | SSRN |
Professor Michael Tilbury took up the Chair in Private Law at the University of Hong Kong in March 2010. He was previously the Full-time Commissioner at the New South Wales Law Reform Commission, a position that he had held since 2002. Immediately before that, he was Edward Jenks Professor of Law and Deputy Dean of the Law School at the University of Melbourne, and Academic Secretary of the Victorian Attorney-General’s Law Reform Advisory Council. He has also held the positions of Rowland Professor of Commercial Law and inaugural Director of the Commercial Law Institute at the University of Zimbabwe; Professor of Law at the University of Tasmania; and Head of the School of Law at the University of New South Wales.
Professor Tilbury’s teaching commitments have centred on Contract, Comparative Law, Conflict of Laws, Insurance Law, Remedies and on graduate courses introducing students from civil law jurisdictions to the common law. His major publications are a two-volume work on Civil Remedies published by Butterworths in 1990 and 1993; a co-authored casebook, Remedies: Commentary and Materials, which is used in the teaching of remedies in most law schools in Australia; and the co-authored Conflict of Laws in Australia, published by Oxford University Press in 2002.
Professor Tilbury has led, or been involved in, over 40 law reform projects in Australia, both at State level and nationally. Most recently, he was the Commissioner-in-charge of the NSW Law Reform Commission’s review of privacy law in that State.
Professor Tilbury is a graduate of the Universities of London and Oxford and a barrister of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
Selected recent research:
“Coherence, Non-pecuniary Loss and the Construction of Privacy” in J Berryman and R Bigwood (eds) The Law of Remedies: New Directions in the Common Law (Irwin Law, Toronto, 2010) pp 127-170.
“Privacy and Private Law: Developing the Common Law of Australia” in E Bant and M Harding (eds), Exploring Private Law (Cambridge UP, 2010) pp 86-109.
Remedies: Commentary and Materials (5th ed, Lawbook Co, 2011) pp i-xlv, 1-1037 (with M Gillooly, E Bant and N Witzleb).
Selected recent presentations:
“‘Win-win’ or ‘Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Priest?’: The Relationship between Law Reform Commissions and Governments”, Public Lecture, Law Commission of Ontario, University of Windsor Faculty of Law and the Law Society of Upper Canada, Convocation Hall, Osgoode Hall, Toronto, Ontario, 12 May 2009.
“Remedies for Breach of Confidence in Privacy Contexts”, Workshop on the Future of Breach of Confidence, Centre for Media and Communications Law, the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2 December 2009.
“Protecting Dignity (or Personality?) in Private Law”, Annual Academic Conference on Law of PKU-HKU, Peking University, Beijing, 18-19 October 2000.
