Climate Change Expert Martin Lockman to Join William & Mary Law Faculty
William & Mary Law School announced today that Professor Martin Lockman will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Law beginning in the 2025-2026 academic year.
Lockman joins William & Mary from Columbia Law School, where he has served as a Climate Law Fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Lockman has held prior academic appointments as an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia Law School and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law.
“The Law School is not only pleased to welcome Professor Lockman to our community of citizen lawyers, but also happy to note that he arrives as William & Mary commences its Year of the Environment," said A. Benjamin Spencer, Dean and Trustee Professor of Law. “Professor Lockman’s expertise will greatly benefit our students’ efforts to navigate complex environmental regulations, advocate for policy changes, and champion sustainability and conservation as rising sea levels affect coastal areas locally and across the globe.”
Lockman’s work at the Sabin Center has focused on climate-related financial risk and the law and finance of complex climate infrastructure projects. Prior to joining the Sabin Center, Lockman worked in renewable energy and infrastructure finance at Milbank LLP’s New York office. From 2021-2022, he clerked for the Honorable Cynthia M. Rufe on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Lockman graduated from Columbia Law School in 2019, where he was a James Kent Scholar (2017-2019) and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar (2016-2017). At Columbia, he served as Articles Editor for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and worked with the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.
Prior to law school, Lockman worked as a community organizer in southern West Virginia and researched economic policy issues at a racial justice think tank in New York. Lockman received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014.
Lockman’s recent and forthcoming publications include Environmental Repair in the Energy Transition, 114 Calif. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026), The Private Litigation Impact of New York’s Green Amendment, 49 Colum. J. Envt’l. L. 357 (2024), Climate Entrenchment in Unstable Legal Regimes, 118 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online (2023), and Fencing the Wind: Property Rights in Renewable Energy, 50 W. Va. L. Rev. 27 (2022).
Lockman frequently appears in national media as an expert in climate law. His work has been cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, among others.
At William & Mary, Lockman will teach Environmental Law and Climate Change Law, and he will continue his research at the intersection of property law and environmental law. Lockman’s scholarship attempts to answer a critical question faced by our society: how can law be used, or adapted, to address the pressures of climate change and the global energy transition?
In his spare time, Lockman is an avid cook, a voracious reader, and enthusiastic (if amateur) Appalachian fiddler.
“I am incredibly excited to join William & Mary Law School and the Williamsburg community,” Lockman said. “Two hundred and fifty years ago, William & Mary invented modern legal education. In response to the pressures of their age, the school’s students and faculty built new and enduring systems of democratic governance that reshaped America and the world. Today, William & Mary remains at the forefront of research, scholarship, and education on the most important issues facing our society. Between the increasing salience of climate change to coastal Virginia and the founding of the Batten School of Coastal and Marine Sciences, there could not be a more exciting place to shape the next century of environmental law.”