Illegality after Patel v Mirza

Speaker: Professor Andrew Burrows QC, FBA, DCL (All Souls College)
Chair: The Rt. Hon. Lord Toulson (Served as a Justice of the Supreme Court)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2016-17

About the lecture

English law on illegality in private law (for example, illegal contracts) has long been regarded as both difficult and unsatisfactory. In July 2016, the Supreme Court, sitting as a panel of nine, looked at the area again in Patel v Mirza. Here £620,000 had been paid for the defendant to bet on share prices using inside information (thereby committing the crime of insider dealing). The agreement was not carried out because the information was not forthcoming.

Was the claimant entitled to repayment of that money? In answering that question, a majority of the Supreme Court set out a controversial new approach to this area of the law, which was vigorously rejected by the minority judges. This lecture examines the reasoning in the case and asks whether Patel v Mirza constitutes a triumph or a tragedy for the law of illegality.

About the speaker

Andrew Burrows, MA, DCL, LLM (Harvard), QC (Hon), FBA, Barrister and Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple is Professor of the Law of England in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College.

He was Law Commissioner for England and Wales (1994-1999) and is a Recorder, a Door Tenant of Fountain Court Chambers, London, and in 2015-16 was President of the Society of Legal Scholars.

His books include Remedies for Torts and Breach of Contract, The Law of Restitution, Understanding the Law of Obligations, A Casebook on Contract, A Restatement of the English Law of Unjust Enrichment, and A Restatement of the English Law of Contract. He is a joint author of Anson’ s Law of Contract, the general editor of English Private Law and an editor of Chitty on Contracts and Clerk and Lindsell on Torts.