Robin Craig from Florida State University will join the College of Law during the Spring 2012 semester as a visiting faculty member. According to Wallace Stegner Center Director Bob Keiter, “My colleagues and I have gotten to know Robin and her outstanding and diverse scholarship in environmental law over the years. We look forward to having her with us, and we’re sure our students will greatly enjoy her in the classroom.”
After earning a Ph.D. at U.C. Santa Barbara in English literature, Robin Craig attended the Lewis & Clark School of Law in Portland, Oregon. There, she worked for the Natural Resources Section, General Counsel Division, of the Oregon Department of Justice, where she worked on a variety of environmental law issues, from the Clean Water Act to CERCLA cleanups to salmon and tribal issues to the intersection of state tax law and environmental law. After graduation, she stayed in Portland to clerk for two years for U.S. District Judge Robert Jones.
Craig has previously taught at the Lewis & Clark School of Law, Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, Indiana University—Indianapolis School of Law, and the Florida State University School of Law. Her areas of professional expertise include Property, Environmental Law, Administrative Law, Water Law, Toxic Torts, and Civil Procedure.
At the College of Law, Craig will teach Property to first-year students and Toxic Torts to upper-division students. She will also participate in many of the Stegner Center’s activities and events. “I’m excited about returning to teaching Property after teaching Civil Procedure for several years; I’ve alternated between the two for my entire teaching career,” Craig said. “As for Toxic Torts, this will be my first opportunity to teach the course with the recently released textbook Toxic and Environmental Torts that I co-authored with Mike Green, Andy Klein, and Joe Sanders.”
In her teaching, Craig uses what she describes as a “user-friendly” Socratic method. To keep her classes from being too intimidating, she employs pictures, videos, and a sense of humor that she hopes will encourage students to engage with the materials, especially as her hypotheticals get increasingly outrageous. “In Property, for example, we’ll be talking about elephants and tigers roaming the streets of Salt Lake City and the Toddler’s Rules of Property. In Toxic Torts, we’ll be talking about everything from groundwater contamination to nuclear testing to claims that vaccinations cause autism in children,” she explained.
Although she has lived in Florida for five years and spent the four years before that in Indiana, the California native said she still considers the West her home and said she eagerly anticipates being surrounded by mountains, and is particularly looking forward to learning how to snowboard.