Biography
Ben McFarlane is Professor of English Law and a Fellow of St John's College. He was an undergraduate and graduate law student at Oxford, and was a Fellow of Christ Church (1999-2003), St Peter's (2003-2004) and Trinity College (2004-2012) before joining UCL as a Professor of Law in 2012. He rejoined the Oxford Faculty of Law in 2019. He teaches in private law subjects, including Land and Trusts on the FHS course and Advanced Property and Trusts on the BCL/ MJur. He is happy to supervise graduate research students working on topics in property and/or trusts and equity.
A video of his 2022 inaugural lecture is available on the Faculty's YouTube site.
His research focusses on the interaction of the law of property and the law of obligations, and he is particularly interested in the extent to which coherent principles can be extracted from the great mass of judicial decisions that make up the common law. He has explored this theme in books such as The Structure of Property Law (2009) and The Law of Proprietary Estoppel (2nd edn, 2020) and is a co-author of books aimed at students as well as practitoners in the area of land law and trusts, such as Land Law: Text Cases and Materials (4th edn, 2018), Land Law: Core Text (2nd edn, 2020), Hayton and Mitchell's Text, Cases and Materials on the Law of Trusts & Equitable Remedies (14th edn, 2015) and is a contributing author of Snell's Equity (34th edn, 2020). He was also co-editor of Modern Studies in Property Law: vol 10 and is an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association and the Property Bar Association. He holds visiting appointments at the University of Paris II and the Melbourne Law School, where he is a Senior Fellow, and he is a Member of the International Advisory Panel on the American Law Institute's Restatment (Fourth) of Property.