Simon Ball Prize

The UKELA Simon Ball Academic Prize for Outstanding Student Achievement sponsored by OUP

The UKELA Simon Ball Prize is a new award and is awarded annually to recognise and celebrate student achievement in the field of environmental law. The award is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students at a UK higher education institution from any academic discipline so long as the basis of the contribution has relevance to the advancement of environmental law or otherwise to the charitable objects of UKELA. The basis of the award is not limited to academic achievement and may extend to any achievement attained by, or contribution made by, the student.

Elizabeth Muir

UKELA is delighted to announce that this year's winner is Elizabeth Muir, a student from Strathclyde University. Elizabeth wins £250 of books from OUP and a subscription to the Journal of Environmental Law, as well as free UKELA membership for a year.

Elizabeth won on the basis of her LLB (Hons) dissertation: ‘Properly conceived environmental regulation: the drive towards the low-carbon economy’. This challenged some of the orthodox thinking on emissions trading, examining this in the wider context of regulation and competition law, and pointed to weaknesses that suggest that alternative approaches are more likely to be successful in encouraging innovation and achieving long-term reductions in emissions. For writing a dissertation that demonstrated the application of understanding across a range of fields, a willingness to tackle big issues and widely accepted ideas and the ability to write in an engaging style, the judges felt she deserved to edge ahead of a strong field.

Elizabeth's dissertation (Adobe Acrobat)

Simon Ball

Simon Ball taught law at Sheffield University from 1979 until his death, aged 39, in 1996. He was a founder member of UKELA and actively involved in the Association. Simon was one of the first to teach environmental law as a subject and in 1991, with Stuart Bell, authored one of the first texts on Environmental Law. He was very highly regarded as a teacher, and his textbook writing set the standard for work that was both academically rigorous and considered but also accessible to students.