Judge Elizabeth Cooke is a judge in the Lands Chamber of the Upper Tribunal.

She trained as a solicitor at Withers in the 1980s. She left practice in 1991 and obtained an LLM (Master of Laws) in Property Law from the University of Reading in 1992, and was then appointed a lecturer in the Reading Law School and awarded a personal chair in 2003.

While at Reading she wrote articles on a wide range of property law issues; her books include Estoppel (2000), The new law of land registration (2002) and Land Law (in the Oxford Clarendon series, 2006 and 2012).

From 2008 to 2015 Judge Cooke served as a Law Commissioner for England and Wales. She was  responsible for the commission’s reports on property, family and trust law during that period, including Easements, Covenants and Profits a Prendre (2011), Electronic Communications Code (2013), Conservation Covenants (2014) and Rights to Light (2014). From 2015 to 2019 she was Principal Judge of the Land Registration division of the Property Chamber, First-tier Tribunal. She has also been a Deputy High Court Judge since 2013, sitting in the Administrative Court and the Chancery Division. She is a member of the editorial board of Halsbury’s Laws of England, and one of the authors of the 9th edition of Megary and Wade: The Law of Real Property.

Her hobbies include running, rock climbing, baroque chamber music and, as she puts it, “watching the children take off in unexpected directions”.