Christopher HARE
Visiting Associate Professor
Visiting Period : 28 July 2015 to 29 August 2015

Associate Professor Hare is an Associate Professor of Law and a Fellow of Somerville College. He was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge and was in the first cohort of students to spend their third year at the University of Poitiers, France. He then spent a year at Harvard Law School (LLM) and read for the BCL at Brasenose College.

His teaching and research interests lie broadly in the law of obligations and the corporate and commercial law fields, with particular focus on domestic and international banking law, corporate finance, and shareholder remedies.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, there has been a surge in attempts by retail banking customers and private banking and institutional banking clients to argue that they are owed some positive, protective duty to look after their best interests, to safeguard their investments or to provide advice on a particular financial product or proposed course of action. These arguments have been variously dressed up as allegations of breach of fiduciary duty, breach of an implied duty of honesty or good faith or breach of an advisory duty. The seminar will examine various areas in which a good faith/honesty standard has been imposed to regulate inter-creditor conduct (including the doctrine of marshaling, the rule against tacking, the enforcement of a senior creditor's security rights over assets in which junior secured creditors also have an interest, the development of a good faith standard in the syndicated loan and bond issue context, and the development of the Socimer implied term) and consider the justifications (or otherwise) for such a development, particularly in light of the traditional hostility to such concepts in the banking law field more generally. The seminar will also consider the extent to which these disparate examples of inter-creditor good faith can be, and should, be subsumed within a more generalized good faith or abuse of rights doctrine.