Professor Sinéad Agnew

Sinéad Agnew is the Catherine Seville Professor of Private Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. Sinéad teaches Equity on the Law Tripos, Advanced Property and Trusts and Advanced Obligations and Remedies on the LLM, and she supervises doctoral candidates. She has been the recipient of student-led awards for her teaching at Cambridge and UCL (where she taught previously).

Before becoming an academic, Sinéad practised law for several years, first as a full-time member of Serle Court and subsequently as a litigation lawyer in leading Jersey firms, such as Bedell Cristin and Ogier. During her time in practice, she undertook a wide range of work, including civil fraud and asset tracing, trusts advisory work and litigation, insolvency, multi-jurisdictional enforcement proceedings and multi-jurisdictional probate disputes. She was a member of the inaugural governing body of the Institute of Law in Jersey.

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. She is currently working on a monograph which seeks to explain the role of conscience in private law doctrine.

Sinéad has 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). She has also 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 recently been appointed as a fee-paid judge of the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber).