David FOX
Visiting Scholar
Visiting Period : 1 April 2015 to 8 April 2015

David Fox is a University Lecturer in the Faculty of Law and Fellow of St John's College, in the University of Cambridge. He is a contributing editor of Snell's Equity, and Ruoff and Roper, Registered Conveyancing.

David's early interests in property, trusts and tracing led to a more general interest in the legal treatment of money. He is the author of Property Rights in Money (Oxford University Press, 2008), and in recent years has worked on a collaborative project with economists, banking lawyers and legal historians which will lead to the first history of western monetary law. The resulting book, David Fox and Wolfgang Ernst (eds), Money in the Western Legal Tradition, will be published by Oxford University Press later in 2015.

Research Areas

Tracing Rules in Complex Cases

This paper considers some of the special difficulties of tracing money in complex cases where there are usual rules of proof, which place the burden on the plaintiff, are insufficient to ensure recovery. Money launderers and fraudsters often cover their trail by creating an evidential "black hole" which obscures the connection between the plaintiff's loss and assets found in the defendant's estate. The seminar considers how far the traditional rules of tracing developed in 19th century cases of small-scale fraud can be stretched to facilitate recovery in modern cases involving the systemic misapplication of assets by fraudsters. It considers particularly some recent inroads into the old "lowest intermediate balance rule" of tracing and the limits on "backward tracing".

CBFL congratulates Dr David Fox on his appointment as Chair of Common Law at the University of Edinburgh from August 2017!