Inaugural Lecture of Professor David Fox
Location:
Playfair Library,
Old College,
South Bridge
Date/time
Fri 11 October 2024
Door Open: 5pm
Event Begins: 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Edinburgh Law School presents the Inaugural Lecture of Professor David Fox
The Law’s Creation Myth for Money
About the Lecture
In the opening text of Book XVIII of Justinian’s Digest, the Roman jurist Paulus offers a theory for the origin of money. Money evolved from barter transactions into a specialised kind of exchange commodity. This “money from barter” explanation has a long history in Graeco-Roman thought and has been retold in many places in the civil and common law traditions. But the “money from barter” explanation has been dismissed as a “myth”, lacking any historical or anthropological foundation to support it. The lecture will investigate the long legal history of the explanation, showing its enduring hold in Western legal tradition as a kind of creation myth for money.
About the Speaker
David Fox holds the Chair of Common Law at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand and received his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge.
Before coming to Edinburgh, he was for many years a Fellow of St John’s College in the University of Cambridge, where his teaching touched on most aspects of private law, concentrating on property, trusts, Roman law and monetary law. He has also held visiting posts at the National University of Singapore. He is a Barrister in England and Wales, with a door tenancy at Maitland Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn.
His research interests have a strong historical and comparative focus. They concentrate on the formation of modern trust and property doctrine in common law systems, and on the private law applicable to money.
His recent work has drawn on doctrinal and numismatic sources to develop a legal historical view of money and the law. His current projects relate to the extension of general private law doctrine to emerging cryptocurrency technology.
This lecture will be followed by a reception in the Playfair Library.
This event is free and open to all but registration is required
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