Professor Peter Watts
Senior Research Centre
Visiting Professor of Law; Commercial Law Centre
Peter Watts KC (Senior Research Fellow at the Commercial Law Centre) is a Visiting Professor at the Oxford Law Faculty, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He practises full-time as a barrister at Bankside Chambers in Auckland, and as a door tenant at Fountain Court Chambers, The Temple, London. He is the General Editor of Bowstead & Reynolds on Agency (22nd ed., 2021) and has published widely on agency law, company law, equity and the law of restitution, including: P Watts, N Campbell and C Hare Company Law in New Zealand (2nd ed., 2016), P Watts Directors’ Powers and Duties (3rd ed., 2022) and D Busch, L Macgregor and P Watts (eds) Agency Law in Commercial Practice (2016). He has advised the New Zealand Law Commission and the Law Commission of England and Wales on a number of private law and commercial law projects. Peter was formerly a professor at the University of Auckland.
Other recent scholarship includes:
- ‘Trustees with Absolute Discretions—a Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the New Zealand Courts’ (2022) 36 Trust Law International 3-25
- ‘Agency’ in W Day and S Worthington (eds, 2021) Challenging Private Law: Lord Sumption on the Supreme Court 257-272
- ‘Acting on the Apparent Authority of Shareholders’, (2021) 137 Law Quarterly Review 20–24
- ‘Why as a Matter of English-Law Principle Directors Do Not Owe a Duty of Loyalty to Creditors Upon Insolvency’, [2021] Journal of Business Law 103-121
- ‘The Quincecare Duty: Misconceived and Misdelivered’, [2020] Journal of Business Law 402-415
- ‘Silence and Solidarity?—the Duties of Individual Directors Minded to Speak out about their Board’s Decision-making and Governance’ in C Mitchell and S Watterson (eds, 2020) The World of Maritime and Commercial Law, 345-365
- ‘The Release Fee as a Remedy for Breach of Contract—the Judgment of Elias J in Cash Handling in the Light of Morris-Garner’ in S Mount and M Harris (eds, 2019) The Promise of Law—Essays Marking the Retirement of Dame Sian Elias, 227-248
- The Travails of Vicarious Liability’, (2019) 135 Law Quarterly Review 7-11
- ‘Does Apparent Authority Wane?: a Problematic Question in English Agency Law’, [2018] Journal of Business Law 663-678
- ‘Attribution and Limitation’, (2018) 134 Law Quarterly Review 350-353
- ‘Forfeiture of Agents’ Remuneration’, in P Devonshire and R Havelock (eds, 2018) Impact of Equity and Restitution in Commerce, 203-226
- ‘Some Aspects of the Intersection of the Law of Agency with the Law of Trusts’, in P S Davies and J Penner (eds, 2017) Equity, Trusts and Commerce, 29-50 • ‘The Acts and States of Knowledge of Agents as Factors in Principals’ Restitutionary Liability’, [2017] Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly 385-411
- ‘Actual Authority: the Requirement for an Agent Honestly to Believe that an Exercise of Power is in the Principal’s Interests’, [2017] Journal of Business Law 269-281
- ‘The Insolvency of Agents’, (2017) 133 Law Quarterly Review 11-14
- ‘Unjust enrichment—The potion that induces well-meaning sloppiness of thought’, [2016] Current Legal Problems 289-325
- ‘Agents’ Disbursal of Funds in Breach of Instructions’, [2016] Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly 118-134
- ‘The Onus of Proof in Restitutionary Claims’, (2016) 132 Law Quarterly Review 11-15
- ‘Re Citibank (the Revlon case)—Pleading a Third Party’s Indebtedness as a Defence to Recovery of a Mistaken Payment, [2023] Journal of Business Law 87-98.
- ‘Sequana in the Supreme Court: Cautious Confirmation of the Creditor-Extension to the Director’s Duty of Loyalty’, [2023] Journal of International Banking and Finance Law 74-78.
- ‘Playing the Quincecare Card’, (2022) 138 Law Quarterly Review 530-535.
