Professor Helen Scott
- Regius Professor of Civil Law
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About
Helen Scott studied classics and law at the University of Cape Town before coming to Oxford to do the BCL in 1999. She completed her DPhil in 2005, taking up a tutorial fellowship at St Catherine's College in the same year.
She then returned to South Africa, spending almost a decade at the University of Cape Town as senior lecturer, associate professor, and (from 2014) full professor. She was head of the Department of Private Law between 2014 and 2017.
In 2017 she moved back to England, taking up a tutorial fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall as well as a titular professorship in the Oxford Law Faculty and serving as Vice-Dean: Personnel between 2020 and 2022. She was elected Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge in 2022. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas).
Her research concerns doctrinal law (mainly English and South African) as well as Roman law and civilian legal history, and spans a wide range of subject matter: not only the law of unjust/unjustified enrichment and tort/delict, but also the wider law of obligations, property and trusts.
She is currently one of the general editors of the Cambridge Law Journal.
General Editor, Cambridge Law Journal
Research
At the moment I am particularly interested in enrichment claims arising from the theft of money: in the way in which such thefts are handled across a range of jurisdictions, and in the theoretical/normative justification for the law's response. 'Interference without Ownership (December 2021 - details below) deals with the mechanisms that South African law has developed in order to protect the victims of thefts out of bank accounts. 'Property | Unjust Enrichment' (October 2024 - details below) seeks a doctrinal explanation for Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale in the German law of unjustified enrichment. 'Chasing, Lying and Persuading: D 47.2.52.19 – 24 in Context' (December 2024 - details below) considers the concept of theft in Roman law (and the theft of incorporeals in particular) through the lens of Ulpian's Edictal Commentary. I am currently working on a piece that offers a theoretical justification for enrichment by taking or interference, based on the WA Wilson Memorial Lecture at Edinburgh Law School ('In Defence of Ignorance') that I delivered in November 2024.
I have recently published a chapter in Die unverzichtbare Wissenschaft – The Indispensable Science (July 2026), a collection of essays in honour of Professor Wolfgang Ernst's 70th birthday. Entitled "Masters, Slaves and Insults: Rereading D. 47, 10, 15, 45‒48", the chapter argues that the classical Roman jurist Ulpian conceptualised the wrong (iniuria) done when a slave was beaten as a wrong to the slave themself rather than their master. The recognition of slaves' personhood that this move entails put Ulpian at odds with his predecessor Gaius (cf Gaius Institutes III.222) and indeed with the slave-owning culture of which Ulpian himself was a part. Building on this historical work, I am currently writing a chapter on the role of intention in the contemporary South African delict of iniuria, and in the law of tort/delict more generally.
Research centres: Cambridge Private Law Centre (CPLC)