Professor Solène Rowan
Chair of Contract Law, Vice-Dean for Students, Culture & Community
Contact details
Biography
Professor Solène Rowan is the Chair in Contract Law, the Vice-Dean for Students, Culture & Community, and the Director of the LLB in English Law and Master 1 in French Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. She is also a Visiting Professor at Paris-Assas University and an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University (where she held a Futures Scheme Funding Award for world-leading high-performing mid-career researchers between 2019 and 2021).
She specialises in contract, tort, commercial and comparative law and is the author of the award-winning monograph, Remedies for Breach of Contract: a Comparative Analysis of the Protection of Performance (OUP 2012) (which won the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (First Prize, 2012) and the New Author’s Inner Temple Book Prize for Outstanding Authorship (Runner-up, 2015)), and the New French Law of Contract (OUP 2022). She a member of the editorial team of Chitty on Contracts (Sweet & Maxwell). She read law as an undergraduate at King's College London and Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and undertook LLM and doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge.
Prior to joining King’s, Solène was a Professor of private law at the University of Oxford (2021-2022), an Associate Professor at the ANU (2019-2021), an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2012-2018) and a Fellow and College Lecturer in Law at Queens' College, Cambridge (2008-2012). She has held visiting lectureships at the universities of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) and Osaka Gakuin, and she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at Keio University, Tokyo. She is a non-practising solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales. Her work has recently been cited by the Scottish Law Commission, the Court of Appeal of Singapore, and the Court of Appeal of Ireland.
Research interests
- Contract law
- Comparative law
- Tort law
- Commercial law
- French law
Selected publications
Books
- Chitty on Contracts, 35th edn (chapter 30 on damages) (Sweet & Maxwell 2023)
- The New French Law of Contract (OUP 2022)
- Remedies for Breach of Contract: A Comparative Analysis of the Protection of Performance (OUP 2012)
Selected peer-reviewed articles
- “Abuse of Rights in English Contract Law: Hidden in Plain Sight?” (2021) 84(5) MLR 1066–1092
- “The ‘Legitimate Interest in Performance’ Requirement in the Law on Penalties” [2019] Cambridge Law Journal 148-174
- “Cost of Cure Damages and the Relevance of the Injured Promisee’s Intention to Cure” [2017] Cambridge Law Journal 616-641
- “Reflections on the Introduction of Punitive Damages for Breach of Contract” (2010) 30 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 495-517
- “For the Recognition of Remedial Terms Agreed Inter Partes” (2010) 126 Law Quarterly Review 448-475
Teaching
Contract law