W.A. Wilson Memorial Lecture 2024

The Edinburgh Centre for Private Law presents

The W.A. Wilson Memorial Lecture: ‘In Defence of Ignorance’, to be delivered by Professor Helen Scott, Regius Professor of Civil Law, University of Cambridge.

Recent accounts of the law of unjust enrichment (restitution) have emphasised the centrality of deliberate conferral (performance). It is suggested, instead, that the central case of unjust enrichment is the non-consensual shift of wealth from claimant to defendant: ‘taking’ rather than ‘giving’.

Helen Scott studied classics and law at the University of Cape Town before moving to Oxford in 1999 to do the BCL. Having held tutorial fellowships at Trinity College, St Catherine’s College and Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and spent almost a decade as a member of the Department of Private Law at UCT, in 2022 she took up the Regius Chair of Civil Law at Cambridge. She works on Roman law and comparative obligations.

WA (Bill) Wilson (1928-1994) taught law at the University of Edinburgh from 1960 until his death in 1994 at the age of 65. From 1972 onwards he was the Lord President Reid Professor of Law. His academic interests were exceptionally wide. A memoir of Bill Wilson forms the first chapter of a series of essays which were published in his memory: see Hector L MacQueen (ed), "Scots Law into the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of WA Wilson" (1996).

This lecture will be followed by a reception.

This event is free and open to all but registration is required

Host or Publisher Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh