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Hamlyn Lectures 2025 – The Paradoxes of Property Law: From Castles and Contracts to Information and Ideas (Registration Open)
November 19, 2025 @ 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm
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These lectures examine what is protected under the rubric of ‘property,’ and why this special form of protection is provided in some contexts but withheld in others. The focus is on the various paradoxes that confound expectations and complicate accepted orthodoxies in property law. These subtle but persistent irregularities provide useful insights in dealing with some of our more intractable modern problems concerning the allocation and protection of scarce resources.
Although all laws serve a societal function, the framework of property law stands as a particularly powerful legal and normative institution. It structures and protects the acquisition, control, use, transfer and loss of access to valuable resources. Yet what, precisely, qualifies as ‘property’? What kinds of legal protection follow from that classification? And, crucially, what lies outside the “property box,” and with what consequences?
The aim in this series of lectures is to determine whether the current architecture of property law is capable of responding adequately to increasingly strident modern demands concerning the allocation and protection of new and newly valued modern resources.
Speaker: Professor Dame Sarah Worthington
Sarah Worthington DBE KC(Hon) FBA is a British legal scholar and barrister. She is Professor of Law at the LSE, trustee of the British Museum and Chair of LSE Press. She returned to the LSE in 2022 after 11 years in Cambridge as the Downing Professor of the Laws of England where she co-founded and directed the Cambridge Private Law Centre. She specialises in commercial equity, personal property and corporate law. Her work has been influenced by time spent as a part-time deputy High Court judge, visiting appointments in Australia, South Africa and Hong Kong, and work with law reform and advisory bodies in the UK, US and Europe. She is a Barrister and Bencher of Middle Temple and an Academic Member of South Square Chambers. Her books include Equity in the Clarendon Law Series, the monograph Proprietary Interests in Commercial Transactions and Gower’s Principles of Modern Company Law (forthcoming edition with Professor Paul Davies and Mary Stokes).
Chair: Professor Niamh Moloney
To attend this event, you must register for a ticket. Please follow the hyperlink below to complete your registration.