Dr Timothy Liau

Dr Timothy Liau

Assistant Professor of Law

LSE Law School

Room No
Cheng Kin Ku Building 6.14
Languages
English, French, Mandarin
Key Expertise
Private Law

About me

Timothy Liau (pronounced lee-ow) is Assistant Professor of Law at the LSE Law School. He previously held the position of Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and prior to that, Stipendiary Lecturer in Law at Merton College, Oxford. He holds an LLB from NUS, where he was top First and Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medallist. He did his postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar, and Graduate Prize Scholar at Merton College, reading for the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL), MPhil, and DPhil, while also teaching Commercial Remedies on the BCL.

Timothy’s core research interests are in remedies, unjust enrichment, contracts, and foundational questions about private law’s structure and basic concepts. He is the author of Standing in Private Law (OUP 2023), which won the Society of Legal Scholars’ Peter Birks prize in 2024, and his publications have been cited by the High Court of Australia, Singapore High Court and Court of Appeal, and in leading practitioner treatises like Goff & Jones on Unjust Enrichment, Lewin on Trusts, and Chitty on Contracts.

He remains an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow (EWB Centre for Law & Business) and Associate Academic Fellow (Centre for Legal Theory) at the National University of Singapore. Draft papers can be found on SSRN.

Research interests

Private law: especially contracts, restitution, remedies, and private law theory.

I have written about topics like contractual interpretation, misrepresentation, no-oral-modification clauses, privity of contract, and proprietary restitution. 

Currently I am working on projects including contractual remedies; enforcement of trusts; restitution from public authorities; declaratory judgments; and punishment.

Teaching

Books

Standing in Private Law (OUP 2023)

Standing in Private Law: Powers of Enforcement in the Law of Obligations and Trusts develops the idea that we should attend more to 'standing', conceived as a power to hold another accountable before a court as a distinct private law concept. Prominent lawyers have claimed that private law does not have or need standing rules, yet this seems implausible. If private law is obligation-imposing, we need rules about who can sue on these obligations to hold their bearers accountable. This book argues that a reason why standing has been relatively overlooked and under-conceptualized, receiving meagre attention from private lawyers, is because it has been obscured from plain sight: it has been swallowed up by the more dominant and capacious concept of a 'right'. However, standing is a distinct and separable private law concept that can and should be distinguished more clearly from 'right'. Doing so is necessary for the continued rational development of private law doctrine. It is also necessary for a deeper theoretical understanding of standing's significance, and its place within the remedial apparatus of private law. This book argues that an implicit standing rule exists across the law of obligations. It examines its justifiability, and the justifiability of exceptions to the rule. It also shows how and why recognising standing's distinctiveness can help us to interpret, develop, and resolve debates within different areas of private law, including the laws of contract, torts, unjust enrichments, and relatedly, the law of trusts.

click here for publisher's site

Foreword to the book by the Honourable Justice James Edelman, High Court of Australia

Reviews:
Alexander Georgiou, (2024) 83(1) Cambridge Law Journal 184
- Ross Cranston KC FBA, (2023) 38(9) Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law 638

Publications