Professor David Fox

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.