Des Voeux Chambers Oxford-HKU Visiting Fellowship Public Lecture (7 Sept 2017)

Des Voeux Chambers Oxford-HKU Visiting Fellowship
Public Lecture

Chaired by The Honourable Mr Justice Jonathan Harris,

Judge of the Court of First Instance of the High Court

Date: 7 September 2017 (Thursday)

Time: 18:30 – 20:30 (Drinks reception will be held after the lecture)

Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, 

Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Humans as a Service? The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy 
Dr Jeremias Prassl

Uber, Didi, Deliveroo, Amazon’s MTurk, UpWork, TaskRabbit &co: On-demand work in the gig economy has had a profound impact on traditional conceptions of employment relationships. The completion of ‘tasks’, ‘gigs’ or ‘rides’ in the (digital) crowd fundamentally challenges our understanding of work in modern labour markets: gone are the stable employment relationships between firms and workers, replaced by a world in which everybody can be ‘their own boss’, enjoy the rewards – and face the risks – of independent businesses. Litigation between workers, customers, and platforms is on the rise all over the world, with many fundamental questions raised by gig economy work still lacking authoritative answers. 

     Dr Prassl’s talk will explore some of the key questions raised in his new book, Humans as a Service (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017): Is this the future of work? What are the benefits and challenges of working in the gig economy? And is platform work really fundamentally different from existing work arrangements, as many providers claim? Most importantly, how should the law respond and regulate on-demand economy work?

     Dr Jeremias Prassl is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Magdalen College, and Deputy Director of the Faculty’s Institute of European and Comparative Law. He read law at Oxford and Paris II (MA, DPhil) as well as Harvard Law School (LL.M.), and has held visiting positions at institutions including Columbia Law School, the Max Planck Institute Hamburg, UCL, WU Vienna, and Yale Law School. His principal research interests are in the fields of Employment Law, Corporate Law, and European Union Law (with a particular focus on Civil Aviation). 

Justifying Damages: Corrective Justice, Civil Recourse, or Something Else
Dr Sandy Steel

It has usually been thought that the breach of a primary tortious or contractual duty causing actionable harm gives rise immediately to a secondary duty to pay damages. Recently, this view has come under challenge: it has been argued that breach of such a primary duty gives rise only to a legal liability to pay damages. The liability view, as we can call it, is thought to pose a challenge to corrective justice theories of damages which claim that the justification of damages (sometimes) rests upon a secondary moral duty. In this lecture, Dr Steel offers some new arguments for the duty view, but suggests that, even if the legal liability view turns out to be correct, the moral duty of repair may still be crucial to justifying the existence of the liability. In doing so, Dr Steel suggests that the morality of self-defence helps to illuminate aspects of the law of damages.

     Dr Sandy Steel is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, and also a Fellow of Wadham College. He read law (BA, PhD) at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. From 2010-2014 he was a Lecturer in Law at King’s College London. He is interested in the English, French, and German law of obligations and in philosophical questions about that area of law. He has written mainly about torts. He also maintains an interest in general jurisprudence. 

     Click here to register online. Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Kerry Ng by email at ngkerry@hku.hk.

Results of the First Oxford-HKU Des Voeux Chambers Fellowship

Professor Stefan Enchelmaier of Oxford University visited the HKU Faculty of Law as the first Des Voeux Chambers Oxford-HKU Visiting Fellow in September and October 2015.  He recently reported on his visit on the Oxford Faculty of Law website:

Professor Stefan Enchelmaier reports on his time at Hong Kong University as part of the Des Voeux Chambers Oxford-HKU Visiting Fellowship:

I spent four weeks in September and October 2015 at Hong Kong University's Faculty of Law. I delivered one lecture on comparative insolvency law, and one on comparative company law.

     I participated in a panel discussion, following a short presentation, on competition (antitrust) law. These lectures were attended by faculty and students, as well as by solicitors, barristers, and judges from Hong Kong.

     I also participated in a two-day colloquium on corporate law, organised by the faculty with contributors from Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA.

     Together with an Oxford colleague, Professor Chen-Wishart, I offered a well-attended seminar to students of HKU on postgraduate law studies at Oxford.

     Finally, in my capacity as one of the articles editors of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, I discussed with around half a dozen Hong Kong University faculty colleagues their manuscripts at varying stages of completion, with an eye to publication in British journals (possibly, but not necessarily the OJLS).

     I started a research project on intellectual property and Chinese competition (antitrust) law with my HKU colleague, Dr Kelvin Kwok, who was also my permanent contact with Des Voeux Chambers. We intend to present the first results of our research at an international conference in the spring of 2016.

     Besides all this, I had numerous wide-ranging discussions on legal and other topics with faculty colleagues and with Oxford law alumni, and I got to enjoy the generous hospitality of Des Voeux Chambers. My month at Hong Kong University was an unforgettable experience all round.

Launch of the Des Voeux Chambers Oxford-HKU Visiting Fellowship

The Faculty is pleased to announce the launch of the Des Voeux Chambers Oxford-HKU Visiting Fellowship. In September 2015, Des Voeux Chambers sponsored and facilitated the setting up of a fellowship scheme between the University of Oxford and HKU. The scheme enables an academic member of the Oxford Faculty of Law to spend a month in Hong Kong as a visiting fellow in the HKU Faculty of Law, so as to enhance academic exchanges between the two institutions.  The inaugural visiting fellow is Professor Stefan Enchelmaier, who is Professor of European and Comparative Law.  Professor Enchelmaier together HKU faculty Thomas Cheng and Kelvin Kwok will deliver lectures on competition law on 23 September 2015.  Professor Enchelmaier will also deliver two additional lectures: "English and German Company Law Compared" (22 September 2015) and "The Anti-Deprivation Rule under English and German Insolvency Law" (29 September 2015).  For more information about these events, click here.  We thank Des Voeux Chambers for their generous support of the Faculty.

Congratulations to Dr Po Jen Yap

Congratulations to Dr Po Jen Yap who recently obtained his doctorate degree from Cambridge University, where he completed his thesis under the supervision of Professor Christopher Forsyth.  The title of the PhD thesis is "Constitutional Dialogue in Common Law Asia" and will be published as a book monograph by Oxford University Press in 2015.

Dr Yap teaches Constitutional Law in the JD and LLB programmes.  He is currently Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law.