Peter Birks Prize awarded to Ernesto Vargas Weil

The Faculty warmly welcomes the award of the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship to Dr Ernesto Vargas Weil (Selwyn).

The award was announced last week at the annual conference of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) at the University of East Anglia. Ernesto, who is the Spencer Fairest Teaching Fellow in Law at Selwyn College, was the first Latin American lawyer to be awarded this prestigious prize.

Stability and Change in Modern Property Law: A Comparative Approach to the Principle of Numerus Clausus was published by Hart Publishing in August 2025. The book offers a comparative study of how property law adapts to changing social and economic conditions while maintaining the stability on which property systems depend. Drawing on English and German law, it argues that the principle of numerus clausus is not simply a source of stability but also one of the mechanisms that enables property law to evolve over time.

The citation for the award explained:

"The judges were impressed with the clarity with which this book synthesises the English and German law in this area, and how it draws on comparative research, combined with various other approaches, to provide an in-depth analysis which makes a significant contribution to property law theory."

In response to the award, Ernesto said:

As a legal scholar coming from Latin America, I am deeply honoured by this award. The Society of Legal Scholars embodies many of the virtues of British academic life that I have come to appreciate since arriving in the United Kingdom, including openness, generosity and collegiality.

In that spirit, this award should be seen as a recognition of the many people and institutions that were instrumental in the development of this project. Besides the support of my wife and family, it owes a great deal to Ben McFarlane, who supervised the PhD dissertation at UCL from which it stems, and to Selwyn College, the Cambridge Faculty of Law and Hart Publishing, all of which provided the resources and rich intellectual environment in which the research was completed and ultimately turned into a book.

Finally, I hope that the visibility this prize brings to the monograph will help introduce a broader audience to a fascinating topic that, although it may appear dry and technical at first sight, has profound implications for the wider functioning of modern legal systems.

The Faculty congratulates Ernesto on this marvellous achievement.