Dr Sinead Agnew

Dr Sinéad Agnew is the inaugural Catherine Seville Assistant Professor in Law at the Faculty of Law and a Fellow of Newnham College. At the faculty, she lectures in Equity and Land Law.

Before joining Cambridge, Sinéad lectured in law at Cardiff University and then at University College London. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and in 2019 she won an Excellence Award for Legal Teaching from the UCL Faculty of Laws, based on student feedback.

Before becoming an academic, Sinéad practised law for almost a decade, first as a barrister in London and subsequently as a litigation lawyer in Jersey, with a focus on civil fraud and asset-tracing, and offshore trusts law. She is a Barrister (of Gray’s Inn, non-practising), an Associate Member of Serle Court, a founding member and former governor of the Institute of Law in Jersey, and an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association.

Sinéad's main research interests lie in the field of private law, including equity and the law of trusts, the law of obligations, and modern legal history. She is particularly interested in the moral justifications for, and the historical development of, equitable doctrine and equitable institutions such as the trust, and has published widely on these themes. Her work has been cited in the courts of England and Wales.

Sinéad has edited two essay collections: Modern Studies in Property Law: Volume 10 (Hart, 2019) (with Ben McFarlane) and Pensions: Law, Policy and Practice (Hart, 2020) (with Paul S Davies and Charles Mitchell). She is a co-author of Underhill and Hayton: Law of Trusts and Trustees 20th edn (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2022) (with Jonathan Harris, Paul Matthews and Charles Mitchell) and Sealy & Worthington’s Text, Cases and Materials in Company Law 12th edn (OUP, forthcoming 2022) (with Sarah Worthington). Sinéad is also working on a monograph in which she seeks to explain the role of conscience in private law.