Professor Adrian Briggs

Emeritus Fellow

Adrian Briggs has private international law, which in Oxford is only available to those pursuing graduate degrees, as his principal research and teaching interest.

Adrian Briggs was from 1 October 1980 to 30 September 2021 the Sir Richard Gozney Fellow and Tutor in Law at St Edmund Hall, and Professor of Private International Law. So far as college teaching was concerned, he tutored generations of students in land law and the law of contract, and in the more remote past, also in Roman law and criminal law. But his main interest was, and still is, in private international law. His Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments was the most established, and The Conflict of Laws, in the Clarendon series, the book that told the story of the subject. But the culmination of it all, offering his own take on the subject in what had become its hybrid, Euro-common law character, was set out and published in 2015 as Private International Law in English Courts. The timing can perhaps be described as sub-optimal, though other adjectives are also available. As English private international law is now condemned to tread a dark and lonely path, several years will be needed to tear out the law we had and to patch up whatever is left, all the while trying to put out of mind the reason for having to undertake this nonsensical task. It is underway.

Otherwise, his Private International Law in Myanmar (2015) and The Law of Contract in Myanmar (jointly with Andrew (now Lord) Burrows (2017)) served to provide an alternative, and utterly absorbing, intellectual challenge, though the joy of teaching in Myanmar has had to be replaced by the sad substitute of zooming to Myanmar.

He also practises from chambers in the Temple, latterly with the title of KC (Hon).

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Law (Jurisprudence)

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Law with Law Studies in Europe

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