Andrew Steven is Professor of Property Law in the Law School. Between August 2011 and August 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. 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. He has also researched the landlord's hypothec from a comparative perspective and presented a paper on this at the Second Worldwide Congress on Mixed Jurisdictions in Edinburgh in 2007 which was published in the Stellenbosch Law Review in 2008. 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.

He is the author along with Professor George Gretton of Property, Trusts and Succession (Bloomsbury Professional), the fourth edition of which was published in 2021. It is the first student text to treat the three subjects in the same volume. He has also collaborated with Scott Wortley on an annual volume of Scots Property, Trusts and Succession Law Statutes (Avizandum Publishing), which is now in its nineteenth edition. In 2015 he published a book chapter on the Scottish Law Commission's contribution to Scottish property law and in 2017 he contributed an article to the first issue of the Juridical Review under the editorship of Professor Jane Mair on Scottish property law's current state.

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. In 2009 he became one of the founding members of the Akademie für Europäisches Privatrecht of Salzburg. In 2016, 2017 and 2019 he taught on a visiting basis at the University of Fribourg. He has also taught or given papers in Belgium, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the USA. 

He is the Law School Library Convener. 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 in 2017 was elected as a member of the Council of the Stair Society.

He tweets at @andrewjmsteven.

Andrew J. M. Steven's Homepage at Edinburgh Law School