Simon Ball Prize for Achievement

The UKELA Simon Ball Prize is awarded annually to recognise and celebrate student achievement in the field of environmental law. In past years, we have been lucky to secure prizes from Oxford University Press and the Journal of Environmental Law for the winner.

This award is not currently active.

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.

Previous Winners

Sam Boyle, who studied an LLM in Environmental Law and Policy at the University of Kent was the 2013 winner. Sam was nominated for his dissertation on agricultural water pollution, of particular importance to his home state of Queensland, where runoff from farms continues to threaten the future of the Great Barrier Reef. The judges said this difficult subject was handled exceptionally well, engaging effectively with extensive literature to produce a compelling, sophisticated and fluent analysis. 

 

Thomas West of Nottingham University was the winner of the 2012 Andrew Lees prize. Thomas was nominated for his work at Masters level at the School of Law at the University of Nottingham, in particular for his MSc dissertation on “Environmental Justice and International Climate Change Legislation: A Cosmopolitan Perspective”. This was an ambitious piece of work of outstanding quality, originality and maturity, and which followed an exceptional performance on the taught part of his programme of study.