About the Seminar
Lawyers over the centuries have struggled to define money for the purposes of the law. The seminar proposes that instead of concentrating on definitions that aim to identify certain kinds of “money thing” in the law, it may be more fruitful to consider money as a composite entity. The most important components of those entities we treat as money are the functions that law and social practice ascribe to certain kinds of thing, notably the capacity to discharge debts denominated in fungible monetary units. Considered as a whole, money is an aggregation of functions that happen to be associated with, or represented in, certain things recognised in the law of property.
This view gives us a clearer understanding of the relevance of property law to the overall functionality of money, and of the outer limits of those kinds of asset that should be recognised as money in the law. Treating money as a composite thing may also give us a better understanding of related legal concepts, such as the payment of debts.
About the Speaker
David Fox is the Professor of Common Law at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Property Rights in Money (Oxford 2008); and the joint editor with W Ernst of Money in the Western Legal Tradition: Middle Ages to Bretton Woods (2016), and with S Green of Cryptocurrencies in Public and Private Law (2019). His research interests concentrate on the legal history of money and its relevance to modern monetary concepts.
