Professor Paul Matthews
Contact details
Email: paul.matthews@kcl.ac.uk
Room: SW2.25
Biography
Paul holds the degrees of LLB (UCL), BCL (Oxford) and LLD (London). He was a full-time law lecturer at UCL from 1979 to 1983, and has also taught part-time at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, the City University, and the
Institut du Droit des Affaires of the Université d’Aix-Marseille. He was an evening volunteer adviser at the North Islington Law Centre between 1981 and 1988, as well as a full-time practitioner between 1983 and 1991, when he started teaching part-time at King’s. Today he combines legal practice as a solicitor advocate at Withers LLP in the City (specialising in trust and offshore litigation) with teaching and research as a visiting professor (specialising in property and trust law) at King’s.
Paul is Deputy Chairman of the Trust Law Committee (an independent advisory group of trust law practitioners and academics), a deputy master in the Chancery Division of the High Court, and a specialist civil Recorder. He has given oral and written evidence and advice to Parliamentary committees on various reform projects.
Internationally, he is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Law in Jersey (teaching trust law), a Referent at the University of Liechtenstein, and a regular contributor to Italian postgraduate courses on trust law, and has been a member of the EC group of experts on the property consequences of marriage and other forms of union and on succession and wills in the European Union, and a contributing member of the European Common Core of Private Law Project at the University of Torino.
On a quite different tack, he is also HM Coroner for the City of London, a member of the Law Society’s Working Party on Coroners’ Courts and Inquests, and was formerly a deputy coroner for the Royal Household.
Research
Paul is mainly, but not exclusively, interested in private law. His research interests fall into five groups: (1) trust and property law; (2) comparative law (particularly trust and property law); (3) civil litigation; (4) coroners’ law; (5) the laws of the Channel Islands. Often these categories overlap, eg in relation to comparative trust law, or the trust law of Jersey, or in relation to litigation about trusts, or about coroners’ inquests.
He is able to work with materials in French, Italian, and occasionally German. He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Trust Law International and The Jersey Law Review. In the past he has also written widely on other subjects, including restitution and criminal law.
He is currently working on a number of projects, including a new edition of Jervis on Coroners, and an introductory work on comparative property law.
Publications
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The Jersey Law of Property (with SC Nicolle), 1991
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The Jersey Law of Trusts (with T Sowden QC), 3rd ed 1994
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Trusts: Migration and Change of Proper Law, 1997
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Trusts and Estate Disputes, 1999
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Jervis on Coroners, 12th ed 2002
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Underhill & Hayton's Law of Trusts and Trustees, 17th ed 2006 (with David Hayton and Charles Mitchell)
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Disclosure (with H M Malek QC), 4th ed 2012
PhD students & topics
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Irene Nicolau, MPhil: 'Sucession agreements in a European Perspective'.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Law of Property
Law of Trusts
Graduate
International & Comparative Property Law
International & Comparative Trust Law
International & Comparative Inheritence Law