Lucy Cavendish Fellow, Dr Poorna Mysoor, shares her thoughts on the award and her research.
This year, Dr Poorna Mysoor won the College’s Dame Anne Warburton Award. Established to fund research, the award memorialises Dame Anne Warburton, former President of Lucy Cavendish College. Poorna won the award for her research on the interaction of private law with intellectual property law.
We spoke to her about the award, what it means to her, and the impact her research will have.
What did you win the Award for?
I won the award for being able to attend and present my paper at Obligations X conference in Banff, Canada in July this year. It means a great deal to me because this is a biennial conference, and some of the best-known scholars around the world will be in attendance. I’m fortunate to be able to go and grateful to be presenting the paper.
Can you tell us more about your work?
The research I will be presenting on is drawn from the law of contract. It speaks of a particular kind of jurisdiction of the court where even if the parties to the contract have not included a particular term in their contract, a court can still read this term into their contract. We call this ‘implying’ a term into a contract. It becomes controversial if the reason for implying is a policy objective, and is not reflective of the parties intentions. It hits at the heart of freedom of contract, but is justified on policy grounds. I came to be focused on this research because my doctoral work was all about ‘implied’ licence in copyright law, which is now a monograph published by OUP.
How is this important for society and what impact might it have in the longer term?
This research is important because freedom of contract has its limitations. When a party to a contract has an inherently weaker bargaining position in comparison to the counterparty, freedom of contract can result in injustices. Courts must be empowered to bring policy objectives into private ordering even if policymaking is the domain of the Parliament. We cannot always look to the Parliament to give us laws to straighten out these inequalities because the help may not be timely nor targeted to the parties’ needs. Courts can do this case by case. My paper is on how courts should go about implying a term into a contract for policy reasons.
What does being a Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College mean to you, and what are your roles?
The College is an exceptionally inclusive space. It walks its talk on diversity. Being a Fellow here gives me an opportunity to flourish to the best of my abilities. As a Director of Studies, I get to interact with some of the brightest students from varied backgrounds across the country and across the world!