Rate My Professor Emma Lees

Professor Emma Lees holds the position of Professor of Environmental and Property Law in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge, where she also serves as Director of Education. She is a Fellow in Land and Property Law at Downing College. Previously affiliated with Fitzwilliam College, her research specializations encompass environmental and property law, with particular emphasis on controls over land use and quality. This includes biodiversity protection, contaminated land remediation, waste regulations, and planning law. Additional interests involve land law, landlord and tenant law, the application of scientific information in judicial decisions, and the interplay between different national courts in climate change litigation.

Lees has made significant contributions through her publications. Sole-authored books include The Principles of Land Law (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Interpreting Environmental Offences: The Need for Certainty (Hart Publishing, 2015). She co-authored Environmental Law (Oxford University Press, 2024, tenth edition with D. McGillivray et al.) and edited collections such as the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Law with J.E. Viñuales (Oxford University Press, 2019), Environmental Principles in Court: The Case Study of the Habitats Directive (Hart Publishing, 2023, with M. Eliantonio and T. Paloniitty), and Climate Policy after the 2015 Paris Conference (Routledge, 2021, with J. Depledge et al.). Her journal articles address critical issues, including "Allocation of decision-making power under the Habitats Directive" (Journal of Environmental Law, 2016), which earned her the Richard Macrory Prize for the Best Paper in the Journal of Environmental Law that year; "Responsibility and Liability for Climate Loss and Damage after Paris" (Climate Policy, 2017); "Property in the Anthropocene" (William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, 2019); and "Regulation and the Morphology of Property" (Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law, 2019). She has also published extensively on land registration, contaminated land liability, and planning law incoherences.