Professor Paul Davies

Paul S Davies is the Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is also a Barrister at Essex Court Chambers. Paul's teaching and research interests lie in private law. He is the General Editor of Chitty on Contracts, and has co-edited a further nine books. Paul is the author of Accessory Liability (Hart Publishing, 2015; revised paperback edition, 2017), which won the main Inner Temple Book Prize in 2018, and was the joint second prize winner of the 2015 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Paul is also a co-author of Anson's Law of Contract (32nd ed, OUP, 2026 (with Sir Jack Beatson and John Cartwright)), Principles of Contractual Interpretation (3rd ed, OUP, 2026 (with Richard Calnan)), Equity and Trusts: Text, Cases and Materials (4th ed, OUP, 2025 (with Graham Virgo)), and the author of JC Smith’s The Law of Contract (3rd ed, OUP, 2021). He was previously a contributing editor to Snell's Equity for 15 years.

Paul's work has been influential both in academia and beyond; more than thirty of his publications have been cited judicially, including by appellate courts in England and Wales and around the common law world. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law in 2020.

Paul initially read Oriental Studies (Japanese) before studying Law at Downing College, and spent a year in Poitiers studying French Law. Paul worked in the Property and Trust Law Team at the Law Commission before beginning his academic career as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Law Faculty. He was subsequently a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and then Professor of Commercial Law at UCL before his election to the Downing Professorship in 2026.

Research centres: Cambridge Private Law Centre (CPLC)