Description

Christmas arrives. Nicki’s nine-year-old son receives a gaming console and many soft toys as Christmas gifts from his doting grandparents. But Nicki’s son already spends too much time playing games and his room is overflowing with stuffed toys. What can Nicki do? Can she sell the items, even if her son holds title to them? Will title pass unimpeachably to the purchaser?

This seminar, based on an article forthcoming in the Law Quarterly Review in 2026, examines these questions. It focuses on one core question: do parents with parental responsibility have powers to sell their children’s property? Despite the importance of the topic, the law’s position is unclear. The existing academic literature and case-law is sparse, often tentative, and polarized. From a property law perspective, the common assumption is that parents do not have such powers. Nemo dat quod non habet: one cannot give what one does not have. If parents do not themselves hold the relevant property rights, how can they have powers to give those rights to a purchaser?

In this seminar, it will be argued that contrary to the prevailing wisdom, parents with parental responsibility should, and plausibly already do, have the powers to sell property held by their minor children. The history of parental and non-parental guardianship, modern cases on overseas property, and the justifications for parental powers will be explored. This seminar also explores constraints on such powers, most notably by statute and fiduciary law.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr Rachel LEOW is Associate Professor of Law at the LSE Law School. She is a private lawyer whose main research expertise and interests span three broad areas: agency law, the law of unjust enrichment and restitution, and trusts and commercial equity. She also has a special interest in corporate attribution in private law, the subject-matter of her doctorate and first monograph, Corporate Attribution in Private Law (Hart Publishing 2022).

Her work has been published in leading generalist and specialist law journals, including the Law Quarterly Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Cambridge Law Journal, Modern Law Review, and the Lloyds Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly. Dr Leow’s research has been judicially cited by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the High Court of Australia, the Singapore Court of Appeal, and the Singapore High Court. It has also cited or discussed in many leading practitioner texts and important textbooks, including Chitty on Contracts, Goff & Jones on the Law of Unjust Enrichment, Bowstead & Reynolds on Agency, Clerk & Lindsell on Torts, and Hayton, Mitchell and McFarlane on Equity and Trusts.

Before coming to the LSE, Dr Leow was Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. She read for the LLM and PhD at Downing College, University of Cambridge, where she won the Gareth Jones Prize for the Law of Restitution with the then-highest mark on record and the Chancellor’s Medal for English Law, which is awarded to a candidate of exceptional merit in English law.