Rate My Professor Ben McFarlane

Ben McFarlane is Professor of English Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St John’s College, where he also serves as Fellow for Sports and Information Reviewer. A native of Bedford and the first in his family to attend university, he studied law as an undergraduate and graduate student at University College, Oxford, earning BA and BCL degrees. After completing his BCL, he remained at Oxford as Penningtons Student in Law at Christ Church (1999-2003), followed by fellowships at St Peter’s College (2003-2004) and Trinity College (2004-2012), teaching private law subjects during thirteen years in Oxford. In 2012, he joined University College London as Professor of Law before returning to Oxford in 2019 to assume the statutory Professorship of English Law.

McFarlane’s research examines the interaction between property law and the law of obligations, seeking coherent principles from common law decisions across jurisdictions. His academic interests encompass property law, law of obligations, commercial law, equity, and trusts. He teaches Land Law and Trusts on the Final Honour School course and Advanced Property and Trusts on the BCL/MJur programmes, while supervising doctoral students on related topics. Key publications include The Law of Proprietary Estoppel (2nd edn, 2020), The Structure of Property Law (2009), Land Law: Text, Cases and Materials (4th edn, 2018, co-authored with Nicholas Hopkins and Sarah Nield), Land Law: Core Text (2nd edn, 2020, co-authored), and contributions to Snell’s Equity (34th edn, 2020). He co-edited Modern Studies in Property Law, volume 10, and has published articles such as ‘Property: Duties, Diversity, and Limits’ (2022) 33(1) King’s Law Journal 23, ‘Property, Analogy and Variety’ (2022) 42(1) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 161 (with Simon Douglas), and ‘The Nature of Trusts and the Conflict of Laws’ (2021) 137 Law Quarterly Review 405 (with Sinéad Agnew). Holding visiting appointments as Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School and Visiting Professor at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, he is a member of the International Advisory Panel for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Property, an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association and Property Bar Association, and was appointed to the REF 2029 Law sub-panel. In 2022, he delivered his inaugural professorial lecture, ‘The Persistence of Equity: Lessons from the Trust’.