Peter Birks

Peter Birks (3 October 1941- 6 July 2004) was the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford from 1989 until his death and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is widely credited as having sparked academic enthusiasm for the English law of Restitution. He was educated at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar school, Trinity College, Oxford (BA/MA) and University College London (LLM).

Before taking up his Oxford post, he had held chairs at Edinburgh (1981-87) and, briefly, at Southampton. Prior to that, he was a tutorial fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford (1971-81), a strong law college to which he remained very close, and also taught at University College London.

He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1989, and an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, his undergraduate college, in 1994. He was made an honorary Queen's counsel in 1995, and served as president of the Society of Legal Scholars in 2002-03. He lectured and taught throughout the Commonwealth and in Europe.

Birks, together with Robert Goff and Gareth Jones, was a key figure in the extraordinary development of the law of restitution in the last 45 years, that branch of law primarily concerned with reversing a person's unjust enrichment. Birks' lifetime achievement was the general acceptance at his death that this field was the only part of the indispensable foundation of private law to have evaded the great rationalisation achieved by textbook writers since the middle of the 19th century.

Birks' contributions to restitution are contained in four books, and a myriad of articles and contributions to collections of essays. His seminal, but modestly named, "An Introduction To The Law Of Restitution", was published in 1985.

One example of his influence may be seen in the 1991 decision in "Woolwich Building Society v Inland Revenue". In that case the courts held, for the first time in English law, that citizens are entitled to recover taxes paid in a case where the tax authorities had no legal right to levy them. The reasoning of the Court of Appeal closely followed that in a Birks essay but the judgments did not refer to his writing (some critics suggest this was because the lawyers adopted his arguments without attribution). This was put right in the House of Lords, where Lord Goff described his writings as "powerful".

Birks was an extraordinarily prolific scholar, writing or editing more than 20 books and 142 contributions to legal reviews. He was the catalyst behind the revival of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (now the Society of Legal Scholars) as a genuine learned society.He was also an outstanding teacher, challenging but always ready to help any student in difficulty.

His successor in the Regius chair is Boudewijn Sirks.

External links

* [http://ouclf.iuscomp.org/articles/In_Memoriam_Peter_Birks.shtml Obituary from the Oxford Comparative Law forum]
* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1262388,00.html Obituary from the Guardian]