Professor Adrian Briggs

Adrian Briggs was until 30 September 2021 the Sir Richard Gozney Fellow and Tutor in Law at St Edmund Hall, having served as tutorial fellow since 1980. So far as the University was concerned he was Professor of Private International Law; he is now Emeritus Fellow and Emeritus Professor. Although he tutored generations of undergraduates in contract and in land law (and in the remoter past, roman law and criminal law), his main interest was and still is in private international law. He spent 15 years as one of the editors of Dicey, Morris and Collins, The Conflict of Laws, but his own perspective on the subject, in its increasingly European character, as it then was, was set out and published in 2015 as Private International Law in English Courts. This took its place alongside his several other books on private international law, of which Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments is the most established, and The Conflict of Laws, in the Clarendon series, the most conversational.

The referendum in 2016 and the turbulent years which followed it meant that it was, retirement notwithstanding, necessary to un-write and re-write each of these books. Private International Law in English Courts came out in post-Brexit form in 2023; The Conflict of Laws in 2024; and the eighth edition of Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments will be published in 2025. This may be regarded the desk-bound version of what it was to have served under the Grand Old Duke of York.

Aside from the English conflict of laws, Private International Law in Myanmar (2015) and The Law of Contract in Myanmar (jointly with Andrew (now Lord) Burrows (2017)) provided an alternative, and utterly absorbing, intellectual challenge.

He also practises from chambers in the Temple. He was called to the Bar in 1989; took silk in 2016, and was elected a Master of the Bench by Middle Temple in 2024.