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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.
Publications
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:
- Marcus Teo [2025] Singapore Journal of Legal Studies 236
- 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
- 'Injunctions Contra Mundum, Jurisdiction, and Standing' (2026) Law Quarterly Review (Jan issue)
- 'Punitive Disentitlement in Private Law?' (2025) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies
- 'Are Equitable Remedies Discretionary?' (2025) 18 Journal of Equity 246-268 (with A Georgiou)
- ‘Failure of Condition’ in Review Article on The Laws of Restitution (OUP 2023) by Robert Stevens [2024] Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly 353-374
- ‘A Pyrrhic Victory for Unjust Enrichment in Singapore?’ (2023) 86(2) Modern Law Review 518-535 (with R Leow)
- ‘Private Law's Remedial Structure: Claimant Standing, Defendant Liabilities, and Court Orders’ in Mitchell, Saprai, Bettini, and Fischer (eds) New Directions in Private Law Theory (UCL Press 2023) 17-47
- ‘No-Oral-Variation Clauses and our Powers to Vary Contracts’ (2022) Singapore Journal of Legal Studies 225-238
- ‘Privity: Rights, Standing, and the Road Not Taken’ (2021) 41(3) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 803-32.
- ‘Birksian Themes and their Impact in England and Singapore: Three Points of Divergence’ [2021] Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly 350-379 (with R Leow).
- ‘Proprietary Restitution’ in Elise Bant, Kit Barker, and Simone Degeling (eds), Unjust Enrichment and Restitution Handbook (Edward Elgar 2020) 476-97 (with R Leow).
- ‘Abolishing the Fiction of Fraud in the Misrepresentation Act’ [2015] Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly 464-71.
- Review of Accessory Liability by Paul S. Davies [2015] Singapore Journal of Legal Studies 278-84
- ‘Resulting Trusts: A Victory for Unjust Enrichment?’ (2014) 73(3) Cambridge Law Journal 500-3 (with R Leow)
- ‘Characterisation and Shams following Contextual Contractual Interpretation: A View from Singapore’ [2014] Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly 13-18.
- ‘Is Criminalising Directorial Negligence a Good Idea?’ (2014) 14(1) Journal of Corporate Law Studies 175-209.
- ‘Unjust Enrichment and Restitution in Singapore: Where Now and Where Next?’ [2013] Singapore Journal of Legal Studies 331-60 (with R Leow)