Law & joint degrees

Tsilly Dagan is Professor of Taxation Law at Oxford University and a Fellow of Worcester College. Professor Dagan’s main fields of research and teaching are tax law and policy (both domestic and international) and the interaction of the state and the market. Her book International Tax Policy: Between Competition and Cooperation (Cambridge University Press) is the winner of the 2017 Frans Vanistendael Award for International Tax Law. Professor Dagan studied law at Tel Aviv University (LL.B., S.J.D.) and New York University (LL.M in Taxation) and joined Bar-Ilan University where she served as Associate Dean for Research as well as Editor-in-Chief of the law review and was appointed the Raoul Wallenberg Professor of Law. Professor Dagan has taught and researched as a scholar in residence at the University of Michigan, University of Western Ontario, and Columbia University, and was a member of the Group on Global Justice at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem. She is the co-founder of the Oxford-Virginia Legal Dialogs and the International Tax Governance and Justice Workshop.

I read law as an undergraduate at Cambridge, before moving to Oxford for postgraduate study. I was brought up just outside York, where I attended my local comprehensive school. Though I worried that the surroundings would be too alien, and the courses too difficult, my student years – in both Cambridge and Oxford – were some of the best of my life. I made great friends, learnt a tremendous amount and fell in love with my subject. I strongly believe that Oxford needs more students from a wide range of different backgrounds. If you’re intellectually curious and hard working, I urge you to apply for a place. Our Admissions Office will happily answer any questions you may have.

At Worcester I teach Criminal Law and Jurisprudence to undergraduate students. I teach Jurisprudence and Political Theory, and Philosophical Foundations of the Common Law, to graduate students on the BCL/MJur.

I’m interested in legal, moral and political philosophy, with a particular interest in the philosophical foundations of the criminal law.

From October 2024 to 2027, Professor Nolan will be serving full-time as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law.

Donal Nolan is Professor of Private Law in the University of Oxford and Francis Reynolds and Clarendon Fellow and Tutor in Law at Worcester College, Oxford. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford (BA and BCL) and was previously a Lecturer in Law at King’s College London. He has taught tort, contract, international trade law, restitution and commercial law, and has been a Visiting Professor in the University of Florida, the National University of Singapore, the University of Trento and Sichuan University. He is a Senior Fellow of the University of Melbourne, a founding member of the World Tort Law Society, and an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI). He is also a member of the International Advisory Panel for the ALI’s Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property, and a member of the editorial committee of the Modern Law Review.

Donal’s research is focused primarily on the law of tort, and in particular on the law of negligence, the law of private nuisance and the interface between tort law and public law. He has also written on a range of topics in contract law, including offer and acceptance, estoppel and termination for breach of contract, and has an interest in the history of legal scholarship.

View all publications on Donal’s personal website

Leah is a Career Development Fellow in Public Law. She holds degrees in philosophy, law, and the philosophy of law.

She holds first-class degrees in philosophy from the University of Alberta and in law from the London School of Economics. She completed her DPhil research at Oxford in 2019. Her graduate work was funded by University College, Oxford and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. She has been the recipient of grants from the John Fell Fund, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Leah teaches Constitutional and Administrative Law to undergraduate students for the College. She also teaches Constitutional Theory and Advanced Administrative Law to graduate Students for the Law Faculty.

Leah’s research is at the intersection of Public Law and Public Policy. She is particularly interested in referendums, political parties, and the role of scientific advice in democratic decision-making.

Marco is a Tutorial Fellow in Law at Worcester College. Currently, he teaches Tort and Contract, and he has also taught Land Law and Roman law. Prior to his current position, Marco was College Lecturer in Law (2023-2024) and Junior Research Fellow (2019-2023) at St John’s College, Oxford.

Marco completed a DPhil in Oxford. He also holds an MJur from the University of Oxford, an LLM from Harvard Law School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and received the Dean’s Scholar Prize for academic excellence, and a five-year law degree from the University of Perugia.

Marco’s research interests lie in private law (especially Tort and Contract) and in comparative law:

• He is the author of an article offering a pluralist account of vicarious liability in tort law, recently published in the Law Quarterly Review: A Pluralist View of Vicarious Liability in Tort (2024) 140 LQR 61.
• He is the author of the monograph Justifying Strict Liability: A Comparative Analysis in Legal Reasoning (OUP 2022), which explores the most significant justifications that are put forward to justify strict liability in four legal systems, two common law, England and the United States, and two civil law, France and Italy. In 2022, this monograph was awarded the Grand Prize of the International Academy of Comparative Law.
• Marco’s work on the role of punishment in tort law, entitled ‘Comparative Reflections on Punishment in Tort Law’ and published in Jean-Sébastien Borghetti and Simon Whittaker (eds), French Civil Liability in Comparative Perspective (Hart Publishing 2019), has been awarded the Ius Commune Prize for outstanding legal research. This work was also translated into French and published as ‘Réflexions comparatives sur le rôle de la punition en droit de la responsabilité délictuelle’ in the French Revue des contrats, issue 4, in December 2019.
• He is the co-author of ‘Tackling Building Safety through Private Law: A Comparative Analysis’, forthcoming in a collection of essays edited by Matthew Bell, Susan Bright, Ben McFarlane, and Andrew Robertson (Hart Publishing 2025).
• He is currently working on the justifications for vicarious liability, on the concept of foreseeability in private law (both in English law and from a comparative perspective), and on the different standards of liability in the context of accidental harm.

William Swadling is Professor of Law and the Senior Law Fellow at Brasenose College. He chairs the faculty’s teaching groups in Restitution, Trusts, and Personal Property. Before coming to Oxford, he held posts at a number of other universities, including University College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the editor of a number of books, including The Quistclose Trust: Critical Essays. He is particularly interested in the intersection between trusts/property and restitution, and a number of his articles on this topic have been cited in the English courts, most notably in Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale v Islington LBC [1996] AC 669. He is a contributor to Halsbury’s Laws of England (4th ed, reissue), and wrote the section entitled ‘Property’ in Burrows (ed), English Private Law (3rd ed, 2013). He is, along with Professors Peter Birks and Francis Rose, a founding editor of the Restitution Law Review and has held visiting professorships at the University of Hamburg, Seoul National University, the National University of Singapore, University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Renmin University, and the University of Leuven. He is an academic associate at One Essex Court (chambers of Lord Grabiner QC), a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an academic member of the Chancery Bar Association.