Two Law Commissioners appointed to the Law Commission
The Secretary of State for Justice has announced the appointments of Sarah Green as Law Commissioner for Commercial and Common Law and Penney Lewis as Law Commissioner for Criminal Law.
The appointments are for a period of 5 years from 1 January 2020.
Sarah Green – Commissioner for Commercial and Common Law
Sarah Green is currently a Professor of Private Law at the University of Bristol. Sarah joined Bristol Law School in 2017. Prior to that, she was Professor of the Law of Obligations at the University of Oxford, and, before that, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 2001 to 2010.
At the start of her career she was an IT specialist and she brings to her role as Commissioner a depth of understanding of technology and software coding that will provide her with valuable insights to the technical issues that she will be leading on for the Commission.
In addition to her role, Sarah is also Articles Editor for the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, a member of the editorial team of the Professional Negligence Law Reports and a member of the Bristol and Bath Legal Tech Advisory Board.
Sarah has written about a variety of issues including virtual currencies, blockchain issues surrounding intermediated securities, smart contracts, sale of goods law as applicable to digitised assets, and wage theft.
Sarah Green has not declared any political activity
Penney Lewis – Commissioner for Criminal Law
Penney Lewis is currently a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics in the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. She became Reader in Law in 2005, and Professor of Law in 2007. Following a judicial clerkship at the Supreme Court of Canada, she gained an MA in Medical Ethics and Law from King’s College London in 1994 and an LLM from Columbia University in 1995.
In addition to her role at King’s College London, Professor Lewis is a Member of the Board of the Human Tissue Authority (HTA), the statutory regulator for human tissue and organs. She is also a member of Genomics England’s Ethics Advisory Committee and was a member of the UK Donation Ethics Committee from 2010 to 2016.
Professor Lewis’s work is both comparative, covering multiple jurisdictions and different legal systems, and interdisciplinary, intersecting with history, psychology, ethics, medicine and science. Her research covers two separate subject areas. In the area of criminal evidence and procedure, her work has focused on prosecutions for historic childhood sexual abuse and the law governing corroborative and supporting evidence. She has also published widely in the field of medical law, with a particular interest in the relationship between the criminal law and medicine.
Penney Lewis has not declared any political activity.
The Law Commission was created by the Law Commissions Act 1965 with the role of keeping under review the law of England and Wales with a view to its systematic development and reform. The Law Commission promotes the reform of the law to make it clearer, more modern and more accessible. The Commission’s projects bring real benefits to the public, businesses or other organisations affected by old, complex and out-of-date law.
Appointments to the Law Commission are made by the Secretary of State for Justice and are regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. This appointment has been made in line with the Governance Code on Public Appointments.