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About
Timothy Liau (pronounced lee-ow) will be Associate Professor of Law from Aug 26. His core research areas are in private law doctrine (remedies, unjust enrichment, contracts) and its theoretical foundations, with particular focus on foundational questions about private law’s structure and its basic concepts.
Timothy’s research has been cited by international apex courts like the Singapore Court of Appeal and High Court of Australia, and in 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 for Outstanding Early Career Scholarship in 2024 and was longlisted for the Inner Temple New Authors Prize in 2025 (summaries here). Forthcoming book projects include Philosophical Foundations of Standing in Law (OUP 2028) (co-edited with Timothy Endicott and Sandy Steel), and Great Debates in the Law of Unjust Enrichment (Hart 2028) (with Rachel Leow).
Timothy is book review editor for the Law Quarterly Review; Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore (NUS); and co-convenor of the ‘Remedies and Restitution’ section of the Society of Legal Scholars. Before joining LSE, Tim was Assistant Professor at 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 obtained his LLB from NUS where he was top First and Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medallist. He 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.