Date: September 30, 2024 (Monday)
Time: 6pm to 7pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Matthew Harding (Professor, School of Law, The University of Melbourne)

In this lecture, I consider whether it makes sense to think of Equity – understood in its historical and jurisdictional sense – with reference to a single idea. Building on recent theoretical work on Equity, I first explore Equity’s role in the adjudication of disputes before turning to its contributions to facilitative law. Throughout, my aim is to identify ways in which Equity has distinctive preoccupations and adopts distinctive perspectives in the settings in which it operates. I suggest that it might be possible to understand Equity with reference to a single idea, and I argue that if this is true, it shows Equity to be doing work in the legal system profoundly different from what we usually associate with private law doctrines, principles and remedies.

Matthew Harding is a Professor (Dean 2022-2024) at the Melbourne Law School and Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong in 2024. He is one of the world’s leading academic experts on the theoretical underpinnings of private law and the law of charities and other not-for-profit organisations. He is the author of a major monograph on the philosophical foundations of charity law, Charity Law and the Liberal State (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and has published in the world’s pre-eminent law journals including the Law Quarterly Review, the Modern Law Review and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and a past Chair of the Charity Law Association of Australia and New Zealand. He is a member of the editorial boards of Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory, the Journal of Equity, and the Third Sector Review, and a member of the Charities Committee of the Law Council of Australia. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Judicial College of Victoria’s ‘Scholarship for the Legal Community’ online platform.

Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=96493

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.