Research Interests

Hon. Member of the Insolvency Lawyers' Association, 1996, Subscriber Member of the Society of Practitioners of Insolvency, 1997, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Manchester 1995-1997. He became head of the Lancaster Law School in 2008.

His research interests are in the fields of company law, insolvency law, international business law and partnership law. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Company Lawyer and Managerial Law. Having edited the Insolvency Lawyer for a decade in 2004 he became a co-editor of Insolvency Intelligence. He ceased to hold this latter office in 2021. He is a Consultant Editor to Sweet and Maxwell's Company Law Newsletter and was a founder co-editor of the Bankruptcy and Personal Insolvency Reports.

Professor Milman is a subscriber member of R3 (Association of Business Recovery Professionals) and he was chair of the Insolvency Lawyers' Association Academic Advisory Group until 2008. He organised the ILA academic seminar on the Challenges Facing Insolvency Practitioners in March 2007 at the Said Business School in Oxford. He is a frequent speaker on the professional conference circuit and had presented a number of papers for Central Law Training over the years. He also speaks at events organised by individual law firms, sets of chambers and by Regional Bar Associations. In 2010 he became a Professorial Associate at Exchange Chambers (Manchester). He has delivered many talks to practitioners in that latter capacity.

Research

Specific research interests

Corporate Law. Insolvency Law. Partnership Law.

He has carried out funded research for the DTI, the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants, the Insolvency Lawyers Association, the Centre for Business Performance at the ICAEW and for Hodgsons (insolvency practitioners).

Current research projects

Current research focus is in the area of bankruptcy law and personal credit. He is also working on corporate insolvency law reform with particular reference to distributional justice. He presented a paper on the latter subject at Rotterdam in December 2009. He has worked in the area of enforcement of debt obligations outside the traditional bankruptcy regime, and a paper on this subject appeared as Chapter 10 in a collection entitled International Insolvency Law: Reforms and Challenges published by Ashgate and edited by Paul Omar in 2013.

Teaching

Professor Milman has taught in a wide range of commercial subjects both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. At postgraduate research level he has supervised more than 25 successful research students and has several students currently working under his supervision. Topics covered include:

• Building Society Law
• European Competition Law
• Department of Trade Investigations
• Takeovers
• Derivatives
• Receiverships
• Cross Border Insolvency
• Transactional Avoidance on Insolvency
• Joint Ventures
• Overseas Companies
• Banking Secrecy
• Directors
• Corporate Personality
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Rescue
• Corporations in International Business Law
• Financial Crime
• Personal Insolvency
• Free Economic Zones
• Arbitration
• Partnership Law

Publications

He has published Modern Partnership Law (1983, with T. Flanagan), Sweet & Maxwell's Annotated Guide to the Companies Consolidation Acts (3rd ed., 1991, co-editor), Educational Conflict and the Law (1986), Annotated Guide to the 1986 Insolvency Legislation (25th ed. 2022, with P. Bailey), Receivers and Receiverships (1987, with J. Rushworth) and Corporate Insolvency Law and Practice (3rd ed. 1999, with C. Durrant), Regulating Enterprise (1999). In 1998 a Study of the Operation of Transactional Avoidance Mechanisms in Corporate Insolvency Practice (with R. Parry) was published. He was also a contributor to Palmer's Company Law (25th ed.) and was a co-editor of Bankruptcy and Personal Insolvency Reports. He was a contributor of three chapters to a new text (Palmer's Limited Liability Partnerships Law) in 2002 and this proceeded to a third edition in 2017. From 2007 Milman contributed to a number of Divisions in OUP's Annotated Companies Acts. This text went into three editions.

In 2017 he co-authored the third edition of Finch's Corporate Insolvency: Principles and Perspectives (CUP).

2018 saw the publication by Edward Elgar of his monograph The Company Share.

Three of his monographs have been republished in the Routledge Revivals Series.

Recent or Forthcoming Papers

In 2004 Professor Milman had published in the Journal of Business Law a paper on Directors in the Twilight Zone and a piece in the Conveyancer and Property Lawyer on Moratoria in Corporate Rescue regimes.

In 2017 the Common Law World Review published his paper on Close Companies. An essay on identification of partnerships was published in the Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Partnership, LLP and LLC Law Forum in 2018. In 2019 his work on Quasi Partnerships was published in The Company Lawyer.

A text, Personal Insolvency Law, Regulation and Policy (ISBN 0 7546 4302 6) was published by Ashgate in the autumn of 2005. It was later republished by Routledge as part of their Revivals series.

The 25th edition of the Annotated Guide to Insolvency Legislation (with P. Bailey) was published in May 2022 (in two volumes). This text is widely used in the courts as a primary reference work and has received a large number of judicial citings. It has a dedicated Westlaw site. Work has commenced on the 26th edition.

Professor Milman has contributed sections to the Oxford University Press Annotated Companies Act, a major looseleaf commentary which was first published in October 2007. This publication was produced in paperback form in 2010 and went into three editions.

David Milman completed an innovative monograph on how national corporate laws have been affected by the pressures of globalisation - see National Corporate Law in a Global Market: The UK Experience in Perspective (Edward Elgar, 2009). He is also undertook a review of UK personal insolvency laws, which was published in a special issue of the Singapore Academy of Law Journal in 2008. Most recently he assisted the Insolvency Service with a Call for Evidence on the reform of personal insolvency law (published in July 2022).

His paper on distributional justice in insolvency, which was presented at the Rotterdam conference in December 2009, was published by Edward Elgar in 2010 as Chapter 8 in a collection entitled Mass Justice, based on the conference and edited by Steele and van Boom.

His text Governance of Distressed Firms was published by Edward Elgar in 2013.

Another new new monograph, The Company Share, was published by Edward Elgar in 2018.

Milman is currently working on essays on the decline of the institution of bankruptcy, the identification of property within the bankruptcy estate and a 40 year reflection of the corporate insolvency law regime post Cork Report.

Additional Information

Media Availability

On any of the topics listed above. He contributed to a BBC File on Four radio programme on delinquent directors in 1999. He was the subject of an INSOL Talks podcast (no. 21) which was aired in July 2022.

Research Overview

Professor Milman has wide interests in the area of international business law. He is an expert on Corporate Law and on Insolvency Law. Within Corporate Law, he specialises in the law relating to private companies. Within Insolvency Law, his interests extend to both Corporate Insolvency and Personal Insolvency. Generally, he undertakes research within the broad area of Business Organisations, specialising in the Law of Parternship and Limited Liability Partnerships. He researches in Comparative Law in relation to the above subject areas and is currently committed to examining Sharia Law aspects.

PhD Supervision Interests

Professor Milman is happy to consider PhD proposals in the fields of Company Law, Partnership Law, Securities Law, Bankruptcy Law, Insolvency Law, European Commercial Law, International Business Law, Education Law, Fiscal Law, Legal History, the interface between Islamic law and western commercial law

Show less