Emma Waring

Profile

Biography

The Rev'd Professor Emma Waring

PhD (Cantab); LLM (Harvard); MA (Cantab); MA (Dunelm); NY Attorney & Counselor-at-Law (non-practising); Solicitor (non-practising); Anglican Priest.

Chair of Property and Art Law

Professor Emma Waring teaches and researches in the fields of Art and Heritage Law, Property Law, Land Law and Ecclesiastical Law. She is particularly interested in the significance and implications of: boundaries; concepts of insiders and outsiders; legal geographies; constitutional property and expropriation; decision-making; and the obligations of ‘ownership’. She is the editor of two books: Landmark Cases in Property Law (Hart Publishing), (with Simon Douglas and Robin Hickey); and Expropriation Law in Europe (Wolters Klouwer), (with Jacques Sluysmans and Stijn Verbist). She has published articles in a number of journals, as well as numerous chapters in Festschriften and edited books. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the legal protection of sculpture, with its hybrid legal nature as potentially both personal and real property and its interplay with legal
geographies. Additionally, she is working on a project considering the boundaries of sacred/secular space and the legal, theological and pastoral implications of changing uses.

She has acted as a peer-reviewer for a number of publishers and journals including: Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; Hart Publishing; Bloomsbury; Routledge; The Conveyancer; European Property Law Journal; Oxford Journal of Legal Studies; and the Cambridge Law Journal, among others. Her research has been cited by the Scottish Government, disseminated in The Telegraph newspaper, and also used to theorise the conceptual and legal implications of artistic practice. She has examined a number of PhDs in the UK and overseas in the fields of: constitutional protection of property rights and expropriation; planning law; and museums practice.

Additionally, Professor Waring is the Programme Leader of the unique and interdisciplinary LLM in Art Law offered by the University of York, which is a ground-breaking co-taught collaboration between York Law School and the History of Art Department. This one-year Postgraduate Programme builds on a highly successful interdisciplinary and co-taught Undergraduate Module on Art Law that brings together both Art Historians and Lawyers to
explore the legal, ethical and artistic implications of issues such as: censorship; obscenity; originality; copyright and moral rights; auctions; museums and galleries; art crime; fraud and forgeries; connoisseurship and provenance; International Law; Spoliation; import and export laws; and the protection of cultural heritage. Professor Waring is particularly interested in exploring the intersection between law and ethics affecting both the primary and secondary art markets, as well as the legal and artistic implications of the destruction of art.

Professor Waring completed her undergraduate studies in Law at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College) where she graduated with a triple First, having won numerous University and College Prizes. She completed her Legal Practice Course at Nottingham Trent Law School (Distinction), before being awarded a Landon H Gammon Fellowship and other prizes enabling her to study for a LLM at Harvard Law School. Whilst in the USA, Professor Waring passed the NY Bar Exam becoming an Attorney and Counselor-at-Law in the state of New York (non-practising). She then undertook her Training Contract with Allen & Overy, where she completed seats in Private Client, Litigation, Corporate and Real Estate, as well as a secondment to the Court of Appeal where she was a Judicial Assistant to the (then) Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf. Having qualified as a Solicitor, Professor Waring spent a year working as a Judicial Assistant to Lord Steyn, Lord Walker and Lord Carswell at the House of Lords. Following this, she returned to the University of Cambridge (Newnham College) to undertake her doctoral studies in Constitutional Property Law, where her AHRC-funded PhD (‘Aspects of Property: the Impact of Private Takings’) was supervised by Professor Kevin Gray (Trinity College). She then became a Fellow and College Teaching Officer at St John’s College, the University of Cambridge supervising Land Law, Criminal Law, Administrative Law and Constitutional Law and was appointed to a Newton Trust Lectureship by the Faculty of Law, before joining York Law School in 2013. She was a Fellow of the South African Research Chair in Property Law under Professor André van der Walt, and was also a Herbert Smith Freehills Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, the University of Cambridge. She is proud to have been nominated by students several times for a Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award and was awarded one in 2019 for the excellence of her teaching.

In addition, Professor Waring is also an ordained Anglican Priest in the Church of England having undertaken her formation studies part-time with St Hild College, Mirfield, where she also studied for a MA in Theology, Ministry, and Mission (Distinction) with Durham University through the Common Awards Scheme. Her MA Dissertation examined the significance of legal theology and approaches to the closure of churches under the Mission and Pastoral Measure 2011. She is currently serving her Curacy in the Ripon Episcopal Area as a non-stipendiary minister on a part-time basis.

Professor Waring is always interested in hearing from potential research students wanting to undertake PhD studies at York Law School in the fields of Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law, Ecclesiastical Law, and Property Law.

Research

Overview

• Art Law
• Heritage Law
• Property Law
• Land Law
• Ecclesiastical Law

Projects

Legal Protection of Sculpture

This research project investigates how sculpture is protected under English law, focusing on its unique status as both land and personal property. By examining sculpture's hybrid legal nature, the study considers the implications for ownership, location, and movement. This project explores how legal geography influences protection, addressing issues of place, cultural value, and property rights.

Visualising Legal Geographies

Working with an external researcher specialising in photography of places that have been abandoned and changed use (Jon Bradley) this small-scale funded project is an experimental study seeking to explore the intricate relationship between space, law and human perception. This interdisciplinary endeavour uses both legal geography and photography to capture and analyse the phenomenology of actively-used sacred spaces and deconsecrated/secular spaces, with a particular focus on churches. The project focuses on exploring the legal and spatial changes involved when consecrated, sacred land is abandoned or repurposed and becomes deconsecrated and secular.

Publications

Selected publications

Books

• Expropriation Law in Europe (Wolters Kluwer, 2015), (with Jacques Sluysmans and Stijn Verbist, co-editors)
• Landmark Cases in Property Law (Hart Publishing, 2015) (with Simon Douglas and Robin Hickey, co-editors)

Selected Articles and Chapters

• 'Property and the art world’ in Chris Bevan (ed), Research Handbook on Property, Law and Theory, Edward Elgar, 2024
• ‘England’ in Björn Hoops and Ernst Marais (eds), The Acquisition of Immovables through Long-Term Use, Intersentia, Cambridge University Press, 2022
• ‘Procedural Requirements for Administrative Limits to Property Rights in the United Kingdom’ in Martina Conticelli and Thomas Perroud (eds), Procedural Requirements for Administrative Limits to Property Rights (The Common Core of European Administrative Law), Oxford University Press, 2022
• ‘Lessons from Scottish Land Registration Reform: Changes under the Bonnet’ in Martin Dixon, Amy Goymour and Stephen Watterson (eds), New Perspectives on Land Registration: Contemporary Problems and Solutions, Hart Publishing, 2018
• ‘Ubi Remedium, Ibi Ius: Trespass and the Right to Exclude’ in Gustav Muller, Reghard Brits, Bradley Slade and Jeannie van Wyk (eds), Transformative Property Law: Festschrift in Honour of AJ van der Walt, Juta, 2018
• ‘Benn v Hardinge and the Abandonment of Easements’ in Simon Douglas, Robin and Emma Waring (eds), Landmark Cases in Property Law, Hart Publishing, 2015
• Expropriation Law in England’ in Jacques Sluysmans, Stijn Verbist and Emma Waring (eds), Expropriation Law in Europe, Wolters Klouwer, 2015

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Property Law (Land)
• Art Law
• UG Dissertations

Postgraduate

• Programme Leader, LLM in Art Law
• LLM Dissertations
• Law & Art: Parallel Perspectives (Module Leader)
• Art: Commodity or Valuable (Module Leader)
• Art: A Problematic Lifecycle (Module Co-leader)