Centre for Private Law
Co-ordinating (Private Law) Accessories
Date: March 24, 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 12pm – 1pm
Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Roderick Bagshaw (Professor, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
Common law imposes liability on accessories with respect to breaches of contract, torts, breaches of trust, and breaches of fiduciary duty; such accessories may be liable because of what they have procured, induced, assisted in, and then there is liability for participating in a common design to commit a wrong, and for unlawful means conspiracy. This presentation will consider how well these doctrines fit together, particularly in light of what was said by the UK Supreme Court in Lifestyle Equities CV v Ahmed [2005] AC 1, and focusing on causation, intention, understanding and status. This survey then provides a perspective from which to consider whether further co-ordination is an important goal or a Procrustean quest.
Roderick Bagshaw has taught law at the University of Oxford for more than thirty years. He is a co-author of McBride and Bagshaw, Tort Law, which has now reached a seventh edition (Pearson, 2024) and one of the editors of Clerk and Lindsell on Torts (twenty-fifth edition forthcoming, Sweet & Maxwell, 2026). He is currently involved, alongside HKU’s Professors John Murphy and Craig Purshouse, in editing Torts in the Twenty-first Century (forthcoming, Hart, 2026).
Moderator: Craig Purshouse, Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law