Professor Sinead Agnew

Sinéad Agnew is the Catherine Seville Professor of Private Law at the Faculty of Law and a Fellow of Newnham College.  At the Faculty, she teaches Equity on the Law Tripos, Advanced Property and Trusts and Advanced Obligations and Remedies on the LLM, and supervises doctoral candidates.  She has won student-led awards for her teaching at both UCL and Cambridge: most recently, she was named Research Supervisor of the Year 2024 by the Cambridge University Students Union.

Before becoming an academic, Sinéad practised law for several years, first as a barrister in London and subsequently as a litigation lawyer in Jersey, where she was a member of the inaugural governing body of the Institute of Law. She is a Barrister (of Gray’s Inn, non-practising), an Associate Member of Serle Court, an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Trusts Law Committee.

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 is working on a monograph in which she seeks to explain the role of conscience in private law.  She has edited three essay collections: Modern Studies in Property Law: Volume 10 (Hart, 2019) (with Ben McFarlane), Pensions: Law, Policy and Practice (Hart, 2020) (with Paul S Davies and Charles Mitchell), and Law at the Cutting Edge: Essays in Honour of Sarah Worthington (Hart, 2024) (with Sir Marcus Smith). Sinéad has also contributed to two leading textbooks: 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, 2022) (with Sarah Worthington).