HKU Private Law and Theory Speaker Series
The Nature of Equitable Property
18 March 2025 (Tuesday), 6:00 – 7:00 PM
NEW VENUE: Room 824, 8/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
In the last several years a certain rapprochement has occurred amongst those dealing with the topic of ‘equitable property’, in the sense that the questions concerning what might make some right ‘equitable property’ have been illuminatingly focused following important foundational work by Robert Chambers, Lionel Smith, Ben McFarlane and Robert Stevens, and the speaker. Together they have suggested that equitable property rights have a certain form: that of rights relating to other rights. None of the commentators agree on a common precise vocabulary, and part of the point of this paper is to make some suggestions in that regard. But this will be in service of a further objective: to determine whether the power to create a trust falls within the common law world’s judge-made law’s numerus clausus, in so far as the common law does embrace a numerus clausas principle. This is something that has been denied, most particularly by Ben McFarlane. By contrast, I shall argue that the case of the express trust shows that there is indeed a genuinely distinct power to create a kind of property interest which falls within the common law’s version of the numerus clausas principle.
About the Speaker
James Penner (B.Sc (Genetics) University of Western Ontario (1985), LLB University of Toronto (1988), DPhil Oxford (1992)) is Kwa Geok Choo Professor of Property Law at the University of Singapore, which he joined in 2013. He formerly taught at Brunel University, the London School of Economics, King’s College London, and University College London. He is one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of property and the law of trusts, and writes more widely in the areas of private law and the philosophy of law. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of Queensland, Queen’s University (Canada), Jilin University, the Catholic University of Leuven, the University of Toronto and Harvard University and, most recently, at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London.
Chair: Professor Peter Chau, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Registration is required for this in-person event. Please register ONLINE to reserve your place.