Description

There are all manner of suggestions, in England and beyond the seas, which encourage the view that secession from the European Union is going to have a damaging effect on dispute resolution in the Commercial Court in London. It is certainly correct that the picture was not instantly clear, and that patience and reflection is required to see how matters are likely to stand; but the rational view is things will not get worse, and may even get better, as a result. No doubt there are areas of law and business which will find conditions more challenging, but the suggestion that commercial dispute resolution will be in the same difficulty is, to my mind, based on inadequate analysis or wishful thinking. The lecture will be principally concerned with English private international law as applied in commercial matters, but should also (with luck) be of some interest to those whose contact with such matters is tangential.

About The Speaker

Adrian Briggs is the Sir Richard Gozney Fellow and Tutor in Law at St Edmund Hall, and Professor of Private International Law at the University of Oxford, where he has been teaching since 1980. His main interest has always been in private international law, and within that, in questions of civil jurisdiction and the effect of foreign judgments. He spent 15 years as one of the editors of Dicey, Morris and Collins, The Conflict of Laws, but his own perspective on the subject, in its increasingly European guise, was published as Private International Law in English Courts, the first – and, one now supposes, only – edition of which came out in October 2014 and took its place alongside his several other books on private international law, of which Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments is the most established. When the dust settles, and it is possible to see the outlines of private international law after secession from the European Union, it will be time to return to these monographs. His Private International Law in Myanmar (produced in 2015) and co-written (with Andrew Burrows) The Law of Contract in Myanmar (on which the ink is not yet dry) kept him busy in the meantime; he is also starting work on a rather different work on common law principles of private international law. He was made QC, honoris causa, in 2016, and practices from chambers in the Temple.