Professor James Penner delivers Kwa Geok Choo Professorial Lecture in Property Law

On 6 March 2025, Professor James Penner delivered a lecture titled “The Nature of Equitable Property” at the auditorium on Bukit Timah Campus.

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 Professor James Penner. Together they have suggested that equitable property rights have a certain form: that of rights relating to other rights.

However, as none of the commentators could agree on a common precise vocabulary, part of the point of this lecture was for Professor Penner to make some suggestions in that regard. But this served 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, Professor Penner argued 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 Professor James Penner

James Penner took an honours BSc in Genetics at the University of Western Ontario in 1985, an LLB at the University of Toronto in 1988 and completed his DPhil at University College, Oxford in 1992. His thesis formed the basis of The Idea of Property in Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) which won the 1997 Society of Public Teachers of Law First Prize for Outstanding Scholarship by a Younger Scholar (now renamed the SLS Peter Birks Prize).

Since 1992 he has taught law at Brunel University, the London School of Economics, King’s College London, and most recently from 2008 until 2013 as Professor of Property Law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London, serving from 2011 to 2013 as Head of Department. He has established himself as one of the world’s leading experts 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 in China, Canada, Belgium, and Australia.