Professor Lionel Smith

Position

Professorial Fellow in Law

Qualifications

BSc (Toronto); LLB (Western Ontario); LLM, LLD (Cambridge); DPhil, MA, DCL (Oxford); LLB (civil law) (Montréal).

Academic positions

Professorial Fellow in Law, Brasenose College
Oxford Professor of Comparative Law

Academic background and previous positions

Lionel Smith taught at the University of Alberta (1991-2; 1994-96), Oxford University (1996-2000) and McGill University (2000-2022) and was Downing Professor of the Laws of England and Director of the Cambridge Private Law Centre at the University of Cambridge (2022-2024). He was appointed to the Professorship of Comparative Law in 2024.

Undergraduate teaching areas

Law of trusts; comparative law.

Graduate teaching areas

Comparative law; law of restitution.

Research interests

Lionel Smith is interested in all aspects of fundamental comparative private law. He is particularly engaged with how private law understands aspects of unselfish behaviour, and he has an active research agenda in the law relating to trusts, fiduciary obligations, gifts, and restitution, in civil law and in common law.

Selected publications

Smith's latest book, The Law of Loyalty, was published by OUP in 2023, including in an electronic versionby subscription. He is the author of The Law of Tracing (OUP 1997) and a co-author of Waters’ Law of Trusts in Canada, 5th edn (Carswell 2021). He is also a co-author and the English reporter of Commercial Trusts in European Private Law (CUP 2005; paperback 2009) and is the editor or co-editor of several books and special issues of law journals, including Equity and Trusts (Edward Elgar 2019) (with Alexandra Popovici), Comparative Property Law: Global Perspectives (Edward Elgar 2017) (with Michele Graziadei), The Worlds of the Trust (CUP 2013), La fiducie en droit civil (a special issue ((2013) 58:4) of the McGill Law Journal) and Re-imagining the Trust: Trusts in Civil Law (CUP 2012; Chinese translation, Law Press China 2021).

Email

lionel.smith@law.ox.ac.uk