Prior to his appointment Professor Robert Lee was Professor of Environmental Law at the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter. Between 2001 and 2012 he was Co-Director of the ESRC Research Centre on Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) at Cardiff University. He is the Environmental Editor for the Journal of Business Law and an Analysis Editor for the Journal of Environmental Law and he sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Law and Society. He is an honorary life member of the UK Environmental Law Association. His wider interest is in regulatory issues particularly in areas of health and environment. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and holds a higher doctorate (LL.D.) for socio-legal studies. 

Bob has spent time in commercial practice with two of the largest UK law firms and remains a professional development consultant with the Environment, Planning and Regulation Group of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. He has been a member of the Law Society's Training Committee, the QAA Benchmarking Panel for Law, the Lord Chancellor's Standing Conference on Legal Education and the Society of Legal Scholars' Legal Education Sub-committee. 

Bob researches broadly in the field of environmental law. He has a book on food regulation in Europe (Routledge, 2010) has edited a two volume reader on Environmental Law and Economics (Ashgate 2008). He produces the environment volume of the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents (LexisNexis, 2013), and has edited a collection of essays on Economic Globalisation and Ecological Localisation (Blackwell, 2009). His current projects include work on the socio-economic aspects of harvesting and developing pharmaceutical products from marine sponges (funded by Marie Curie) and a review of sustainability duties in the UK, on behalf of WWF (UK).