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Professor Chris Rodgers

Chris is a Professor of Law at Newcastle University. His research interests encompass environmental law and the law of property. He has written widely on the law as it relates to common land in England and Wales and has a particular interest in the environmental governance of common property. His more recent work has focussed on legal arrangements for securing the  provision of ecosystem services from common land – including the use of commons as sites to promote greater public access to green space for recreation, nature conservation and other ecosystem services. He has been Principal investigator of several funded research projects on commons governance, including: (i) Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project AH/E510310/1 Contested Common Land: environmental governance, law and sustainable land management c.1600-2006  (AHRC Landscape and Environment programme, major grant); AHRC project AH/J013951/1 Building Commons Knowledge (AHRC On Funding Scheme); and Realising New Commons, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), for work with Natural England on the feasibility of establishing new commons for recreation and biodiversity, protected by the Commons Act 2006) Previous publications deriving from this work include:

Contested Common Land: Environmental Governance Past and Present (with A.Winchester, E.Straughton, M.Pieraccini), Earthscan Publishing, 2011 xii and 227 pp. ISBN 978-1-84971-094-7;

“Creating ‘New’ Commons for the Twenty First Century: Innovative Legal Models for ‘Green Space’” (with Duncan Mackay, Natural England) (2018) 61 Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 1051-1069. DOI:10/1080/09640568.2017.1333407

“Commons Governance: Normative Pluralism and the Enduring Role of Custom”, Chapter 2 pp. 15-37 in (A.Clarke and T.Xu eds.) Legal Strategies for the Development and Protection of Communal Property (Oxford University Press, 2018) (Proceedings of the British Academy 216); and

“Towards a Taxonomy for Common and Public Property”, (2019) 78 Cambridge Law Journal 124-147.