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About
Timothy Liau (pronounced lee-ow) is Assistant Professor of Law. His main research interests are in remedies, contracts, unjust enrichment, and foundational questions about private law’s basic concepts and structure. His research has been cited by apex courts around the world, including the High Court of Australia and Singapore Court of Appeal, and in leading practitioner treatises like Goff & Jones on Unjust Enrichment, Lewin on Trusts, and Chitty on Contracts. His book Standing in Private Law (OUP 2023) won the Society of Legal Scholars’ Peter Birks prize in 2024, summaries of which are available here.
Before joining the LSE, Tim was Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and prior to that, Stipendiary Lecturer in Law at Merton College, University of Oxford, where he also taught Commercial Remedies on the BCL for the Oxford Law Faculty.
Tim co-convenes the ‘Remedies and Restitution’ section of the Society of Legal Scholars’ annual conference. 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. Tim obtained his LLB from NUS where he was top First and Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medallist, and read for the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL), MPhil, and DPhil in Law at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar and Graduate Prize Scholar at Merton College.
Research
Research Interests
Remedies, Contracts, Unjust Enrichment, and foundational questions about private law ("Private Law Theory").
I have written on topics like contractual interpretation, misrepresentation, no-oral-modification clauses, specific performance and equitable discretion, privity of contract, punishment, and proprietary restitution.