Description

Since the launch of bitcoin ten years ago, cyber-currencies have become a familiar investment and payment medium. Difficult legal questions still hang over their place in private law and whether established principles of property law can accommodate them at all. Can they be owned? What does it mean to say that they are transferred? What would it mean to trace them through a mixture?

This paper develops the view that common law concepts of property are indeed flexible enough to accommodate the rise of cyber-currencies. With some careful adaptation, standard property law rules can apply to them so that they do not in fact fall into a legal void.

About The Speaker

David Fox holds the Chair of Common Law at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand and received his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge.

Before coming to Edinburgh, he was for many years a Fellow of St John’s College in the University of Cambridge, where his teaching touched on most aspects of private law, concentrating on property, trusts, and monetary law. He is a barrister in England and Wales, with a door tenancy at Maitland Chambers in London.

His research interests have a strong historical and comparative focus. They concentrate on the formation modern trust and property doctrine in common law systems, and on the private law applicable to money. He is the author of Property Rights in Money (Oxford 2008) and joint editor with Wolfgang Ernst of Money in the Western Legal Tradition: Middle Ages to Bretton Woods (Oxford 2016). He is a contributing editor to John McGhee (ed), Snell’s Equity, 33rd ed (London 2014).

Who Should Attend

Fintech lawyers; Banking lawyers; Property lawyers