Professor Ciara Kennefick

BCL (NUI); BCL, MPhil, DPhil (Oxford)

Before coming to the University of Oxford for my graduate degrees in law, I studied law and French Literature at University College Cork, the University of California, Berkeley and Université Montpellier I. I have been at the University of Oxford for most of my academic career: I was a Lecturer at Pembroke College and a Career Development Fellow at The Queen’s College. I was then a Lecturer at King’s College London before taking up my current position at Christ Church and the University of Oxford.

I also teach law in France – I am a Visiting Professor at Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris – and I am a Visiting Fellow at the Stockholm Centre for Commercial Law at the University of Stockholm.

In College, I teach Contract Law, Land Law and Roman Law. In the Faculty of Law, I teach Contract Law, Comparative Law, History of English Law and Modern Legal History.

My research examines private law from comparative and historical perspectives. I am particularly interested in the just price, a great legal idea which has influenced law and many other fields of knowledge since the rediscovery of Roman law c1100. In 2020, I was awarded the Selden Society’s David Yale Prize 2019 ‘for an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales from scholars who have been engaged in research in the subject for not longer than about ten years’.

C Kennefick, ‘The Just Price in Salvage Contracts’ (2025) Law Quarterly Review (forthcoming) 

C Kennefick, ‘Looking Afresh at the French Roots of Continuous Easements in English Law’ in W Eves and others (eds.), Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law: Essays in Comparative Legal History from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press 2021)

C Kennefick, 'The Contribution of Contemporary Mathematics to Contractual Fairness in Equity, 1751-1867' (2018) 39 (3) Journal of Legal History 307

Please see: Ciara Kennefick | Faculty of Law (ox.ac.uk)