Bristol has one of the most vibrant and diverse Commercial Law concentrations in the UK. The School of Law has a number of specialists in different branches of the subject, who are active in leading publications at the cutting edge of Commercial Law scholarship. They draw on their expertise in teaching a wide range of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Bristol. They have also recently lectured widely at other leading university law schools, including Auckland, Cambridge, the UN/IMO International Maritime law Institute in Malta, Tulane and Oxford. Professor Francis Rose, Professor of Commercial Law, is General Editor of Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly, the leading international commercial law journal, and of its associate International and Commercial Law Yearbook (of which Simon Baughen is a section editor).
Professor Francis Rose is the author of The Modern Law of Pilotage (1984), Kennedy & Rose: The Law of Salvage (7th ed, 2009) and General Average: Law and Practice (2nd ed, 2005). He is also the author of Marine Insurance: Law and Practice (2004), which was the winner of the British Insurance Law Association Book Prize in 2005. Simon Baughen is the author of Shipping Law (4th ed, 2009), the main student text covering the whole subject, and International Shipping Law section editor of the International and Commercial Law Yearbook. Professor Gerard McMeel is also interested in Carriage of Goods by Sea, on which his latest publication was cited in the Court of Appeal. The Bristol shipping lawyer, together with Professor Malcolm Evans teaches the Public International Law of the Sea, and is responsible for teaching the specialist LLM course in Maritime Law.
Shipping Law and International Sales Law are part of a wider interest within the School of Law in the Law of International Trade. That wider interest is particularly reflected in publications in the area of the Conflict of Laws or Private International Law by Professor Jonathan Hill. He has contributed to Dicey & Morris on the Conflict of Laws (described by Lord Goff of Chieveley as 'the prince of legal text books'), is co-author of Clarkson & Hill, The Conflict of Laws, is the author of International Commercial Disputes in English Courts (4th ed, 2010) and Cross-Border Consumer Contracts (2008), and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Private International Law. Professor Gerard McMeel teaches an LLM unit on International Sale of Goods, which examines CISG, as well as English law rules on CIF and FOB contracts. Simon Baughen specialises in the interface between Commercial Law and Environmental Law. This has led to the publication of International Trade and the Protection of the Environment (2007). Their work is complemented by the delivery of an LLM unit on International Law of Trade and Aid, which is taught by Professor Tonia Novitz and Zoe Godolphin, who also have expertise in this field.
The School of Law is particularly active in teaching and research at all levels in Banking and Financial Law. Harry McVea innovated teaching in the UK in Financial Services Law, and has written a number of pioneering articles on the area. Professor Gerard McMeel is co-author of McMeel and Virgo on Financial Advice and Financial Products: Law and Liability (2nd ed, 2007), an account of the detailed law and regulation concerning retail financial services. He also contributed the chapter on retail investment law to Blair and Walker, Financial Services Law (2nd edn, 2006). Professor Keith Stanton has teaching and research interests in Banking Law. He has published research on money laundering and the civil liability of banks and has supervised a number of research students working on Islamic banking. Credit and Insolvency Law are specialisations of Nigel Furey. Bristol is one of the few English law schools actively engaged with scholarship and teaching in the Law of Taxation, on which Professor Roger Kerridge has written widely.
The School of Law has long been active in all aspects of Enterprise Law. It was the home of the first scholarly journal in the area of Corporate Law, the Company, Financial and Insolvency Law Review (now the Journal of Corporate Law Studies), which was edited by Professor Francis Rose. The Editorial Board also included the late Professor John Parkinson, who was a leading figure in modern corporate law scholarship, in particular from the perspective of political economy and social responsibility. His pathbreaking work Corporate Power and Responsibility: Issues in the Theory of Company Law (OUP, 1993) won the first Society of Public Teachers of Law book prize and he was an active member of the UK government’s Company Law Review Steering Group, the deliberations of which came to fruition in the Companies Act 2006. John Parkinson's work is continued by Professor Charlotte Villiers. Professor Charlotte Villiers has published in Spanish as well as in English and her latest book is Corporate Reporting and Company Law (2006). Her work combines an interest in Company Law with other specialisations within the School in Employment Law, European Law and Socio-Legal Studies. Labour Law in its wider context is the subject of work by Professor Tonia Novitz, who has written on New Zealand and UK labour law, international labour standards, and European social policy. In collaboration with Dr Alan Bogg (Hertford College, Oxford), she is engaged in a research project on ‘Voices at Work: Legal Effects on Organisation, Representation and Negotiation’.
Helen Norman is responsible for teaching in the field of Intellectual Property Law. Helen specializes in the law of trade marks, being co-author of Blackstone’s Guide to the Trade Marks Act and Blackstone’s Guide to the Community Trade Mark. Her work is complemented by that of Andrew Charlesworth, Reader in IT and Law, and Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL). He writes and provides consultancy services in a wide range of IT-linked fields - computer misuse, data protection, intellectual property, internet law and e-commerce law - and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Information Law and Technology and the International Journal of Digital Curation, and the Advisory Board of SCRIPT-ed.
Bristol has long been strong in Competition Law scholarship. The role of Competition Law in relation to public services has been examined by Professor Tony Prosser in The Limits of Competition Law (2005). Competition Law from a Socio-Legal Studies perspective is also a theme of work by Professor Bronwen Morgan, who also specialises in Regulation and is the author of the prize-winning Social Citizenship in the Shadow of Competition: the Bureaucratic Politics of Regulatory Justification (2003).