Professor Andrew J. M. Steven

Andrew Steven holds the Chair of Property Law. From 2011 to 2019 he worked at the Scottish Law Commission where he was the Commissioner responsible for property law reform.

He was the lead Commissioner responsible for the Scottish Law Commission's Report on Moveable Transactions (Scot Law Com No 249, 2017), which recommends reform of the law in relation to (a) assignation of claims (rights to performance of an obligation); (b) security over incorporeal moveable property; and (c) security over corporeal moveable property. The Report was implemented by the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Act 2023. He gave evidence to the House of Lords on the Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 and to the House of Commons on the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.

He was also the lead Commissioner on the Report on Prescription and Title to Moveable Property (Scot Law Com No 228, 2012), the Report on Section 53 of the Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2003 (Scot Law Com No 254, 2019) and the Discussion Paper on Heritable Securities: Pre-default (Scot Law Com DP No 168, 2019).   

His research work has focussed on property law and more particularly on rights in security. His monograph Pledge and Lien (Edinburgh Legal Education Trust) was published in 2008. In 2010 he gave the keynote address on real security rights at the International Property Law Conference held at UNISA in Pretoria, which was subsequently published as a book chapter in 2015. In 2017 he was an invited speaker at the SLS Seminar on The Future of Commercial Law: Ways Forward for Harmonisation at the University of Durham, his paper being subsequently published in Orkun Akseli and John Linarelli (eds), The Future of Commercial Law (2020).

He is the author along with Professor George Gretton of Property, Trusts and Succession (Bloomsbury Professional), the fifth edition of which was published in 2024. He has also collaborated with Scott Wortley on an annual volume of Scots Property, Trusts and Succession Law Statutes (Edinburgh University Press), which is now in its twenty-first edition. Since 2022 he has co-written with Professor Kenneth Reid and Professor George Gretton an annual volume on Conveyancing.

With Dr Ross Anderson and Dr John MacLeod, he co-edited Nothing so Practical as a Good Theory: Festschrift for George L Gretton (Avizandum Publishing, 2017).

Since 2004 he has taught at the annual European Private Law Summer School at the University of Salzburg and has taken a group of Edinburgh Law School undergraduates to the summer school since 2005. Since 2017 he has taught on a visiting basis at the University of Fribourg and since 2023 the University of Innsbruck. He has also taught or given papers in Belgium, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the USA. 

He was formerly Associate Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law. He is the Honorary Secretary of the Edinburgh Student Law Review, a Writer to the Signet and served from 2018 to 2023 as a member of the Council of the Stair Society.

He was a member of the Scottish Parliamentary Working Group on tenement maintenance which reported in 2019 and since 2020 has been a trustee of Under One Roof. He sits on the Scottish Government’s Cladding Stakeholder Group. 

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