Co-ordinating (Private Law) Accessories
On 20 April 2026, the Obligations Group hosted a seminar on 'Co-ordinating (Private Law) Accessories', presented by Professor Roderick Bagshaw, with comments from Professor Katy Barnett.
Common law imposes liability on accessories with respect to breaches of contract, torts, breaches of trust, and breaches of fiduciary duty; such accessories may be liable because of what they have procured, induced, assisted in, and then there is liability for participating in a common design to commit a wrong, and for unlawful means conspiracy. This presentation considered how well these doctrines fit together, particularly in light of what was said by the UK Supreme Court in Lifestyle Equities CV v Ahmed [2005] AC 1, and focused on causation, intention, understanding and status. This survey then provided a perspective from which to consider whether further co-ordination is an important goal or a Procrustean quest.
Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash
About the Speakers
Roderick Bagshaw has taught law at the University of Oxford for more than thirty years. He is a co-author of McBride and Bagshaw, Tort Law, which has now reached a seventh edition (Pearson, 2024) and one of the editors of Clerk and Lindsell on Torts (twenty-fifth edition forthcoming, Sweet & Maxwell, 2026). He is currently involved, alongside Professors John Murphy and Craig Purshouse, in editing Torts in the Twenty-first Century (forthcoming, Hart, 2026).
Katy Barnett is a professor at Melbourne Law School who teaches and researches across private law, with a particular focus on the law of remedies. She is (inter alia) author of Damages for Breach of Contract (3rd edition, 2025) and Accounting for Profit for Breach of Contract: Theory and Practice (2012), and co-author of Remedies in Australian Private Law (3rd ed, 2024).