Date / time
24/09/2024
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
BILA VIRTUAL LECTURE
Professor Kelvin F.K. Low read law at the National University of Singapore and Oxford University. Before his current appointment at the University of Hong Kong, he held previous appointments at National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University, and City University of Hong Kong. His research interest spans the field of private law but with a particular interest in property, broadly defined. He has published internationally with leading journals such as the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International & Comparative Law Quarterly, Legal Studies, Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly, the Law Quarterly Review, the Melbourne University Law Review, and the Modern Law Review. He is a co-author (together with Michael Bridge, Louise Gullifer, and Gerard McMeel) of the 2nd and 3rd editions of The Law of Personal Property, and co-author (together with Tang Hang Wu) of the 3rd and 4th editions of Tan Sook Yee’s Principles of Singapore Land Law. His works have been cited by the courts in Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong SAR, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore as well as law commissions and law reform bodies in Australia, England and Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and Singapore.
The explosion of interest in cryptoassets has revived interest in a curious notion in the law of personal property: the tertium quid or personal property that is neither a thing in possession nor a thing in action. This renaissance, however, has not taken into account historical debates over the same or the law’s experience of the same in respect of patents. Once these lessons are properly accounted for, it will be clear that there is nothing to stop the law from treating cryptoassets as things in action and the law can focus on the more important question of what rights said thing in action entails. The Law Commission’s proposal to introduce a tertium quid into English personal property law, recently tabled as a Bill in Parliament, brings little clarity to the question of what rights cryptoasset holders actually have but introduces tremendous uncertainty into English personal property more broadly. The reform is built upon clear and obvious misreadings of the slim precedents cited in support and is also contrary to trends in other common law jurisdictions.