Professor Bob Adler, now serving as Dean of the College of Law, has spent much of the past two years helping to bring on line the law school’s new LEED Platinum (certification pending) building (and to pay for it!). He was, however, able to keep a few toes in his substantive field of environmental and water law. He will be publishing a commentary on EPA’s recent “Waters of the United States” rule in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Freshwater Science, based on a talk he gave at Utah State University’s Spring Runoff conference. He is also contributing a chapter on “Climate Change and Water Law in Agriculture” to a forthcoming Research Handbook on Climate and Agricultural Law co-edited by Mary Jane Angelo and Anel du Plessis. With Professor Robin Craig and their co-author Noah Hall, he will be working on a new Water Law volume for the “Concepts and Insights” series by Foundation Press. And after a much too long hiatus from teaching, he will return to the classroom this coming spring to teach Water Law.
Robin K. Craig was both elected to the American Law Institute and delivered the Pace Law School Lloyd K. Garrison Lecture on Environmental Law in April 2015. She also presented an additional 11 environmental law-related talks between January and May 2015 to organizations such as the American Bar Association and at law schools such as UCLA, the University of Michigan, Arizona State University, and Lewis & Clark. Craig has had six law review articles appear in print since January 2015: two peer-reviewed articles on resilience in American river systems — the Klamath River and the Platte River — that appeared in the Idaho Law Review; a co-authored comparison of nonpoint source pollution regulation in Australia and the United States that appeared in the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review; a co-authored response to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report that appeared in the ELR News & Analysis; a sole authored article comparing marine spatial planning to planning requirements for the federal public lands, which appeared in the George Washington Journal of Energy and Environmental Law; and a sole authored examination of “Navigability and Its Consequences” that appeared in the Proceedings of the 2014 RMMLF Summer Conference. Finally, she has completed her roles on the planning committee for the 2015 RMMLF Natural Resources Law Teachers Institute and as Chair of the ABA SEER Annual Water Law Conference.
Lincoln Davies has been active publishing and speaking over the last year. In October 2014, West Academic Press published his new energy law casebook, Energy Law and Policy (2014), which he co-authored with Alexandra Klass, Hari Osofsky, Joseph Tomain, and Elizabeth Wilson. Davies also published two articles related to renewable energy law and policy: “Feed-in Tariffs in Turmoil,” 116 West Virginia Law Review 100 (2014) (with Kirsten Allen); and “Evaluating RPS Policy Design: Metrics, Gaps, Best Practices, and Paths to Innovation,” 4 KLRI Journal of Law & Legislation 3 (2014). He currently is at work on articles addressing changing national policies following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the influence of possible drought in the western United States on electricity generation, and the Clean Power Plan. Davies presented his work on energy law and policy recently at Arizona State University, Northwestern University, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and at Kangwon National University in Korea and Otsuma Women’s University in Japan. He continues to write a quarterly column, with Professor Andy Hessick, for the ABA on Supreme Court administrative law developments. The College of Law recently named him the James I. Farr Professor of Law, the chair previously held by now-Dean Bob Adler.
Leslie Frances became President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association on July 1st, 2015. At the College of Law, she has stepped down from the position of Associate Dean to devote more time to her role as Director of the Center for Law and Biomedical Sciences, which has received final approval from the University. She is eager to pursue connections between public health goals of the Center and the Stegner Center’s areas of interest. On the publication front, Robin Craig, Erika George, and Leslie Francis have just learned that their article, “The FDA’s Troubling Failures to Use its Authority to Regulate Genetically Modified Foods,” will be published in February by the Food and Drug Law Journal. The Article argues that the FDA has failed to take sufficient account of the risks of pesticides and herbicides in production of GM crops or in considering whether foods made from these crops should be labeled as such.
Bob Keiter is competing the second edition of The Wyoming State Constitution, which will be published by Oxford University Press as part of its Oxford Commentaries on the State Constitutions of the United States. He has also published, with John Ruple, two white papers on A Legal Analysis of the Transfer of Public Lands Movement and The Transfer of Public Lands: Taking the ‘Public’ Out of Public Lands, and he has completed a book review of Peaks, Politics, and Passion: Grand Teton National Park Comes of Age, by Robert W. Righter, which was published by Western Historical Quarterly. He has spoken at the Federal Bar Association Annual Tri-State Conference on the Wilderness Act, at Denver University Law School on national conservation law and policy, at Indiana University’s Law School on the national park idea, and at the Utah State Bar Convention on the state’s Transfer of Public Lands Act.
Nancy McLaughlin co-authored with Federico Cheever, for use by professors teaching a class or section on conservation easements, “An Introduction to Conservation Easements in the US: A Simple Concept and a Complicated Mosaic of Law,” 1 J. L. Prop. & Soc’y 107 (2015). She published “Interpreting Conservation Easements,” 29 Prob. & Prop. 30 (2015), which discusses why conservation easements should be interpreted to carry out their conservation purposes rather than in favor of free use of land. She filed an amicus brief with four other law professors in Belk v. Comm’r, 774 F.3d 221 (4th Cir. 2014), which was decided in the manner suggested. One of her articles was quoted in Mitchell v. Comm’r, 775 F.3d 1243 (10th Cir. 2015). She organized a conference for assistant AGs in May 2014 on the role of AGs in protecting the public interest in conservation easements (co-sponsored by Columbia Law School’s National State Attorneys General Program and the National Association of State Charity Officials). She provided comments as an Adviser on ALI’s Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations and invited comments on the Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program Guide. She continues to update POWELL ON REAL PROPERTY’S Chapter on Conservation Easements.
Arnold W. Reitze, Jr. wrote articles as follows; “The National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone” (pending 2015); “Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards: Should Cost Be a Consideration?”, Nat. Res. & Env’t (pending Fall 2015): “Biofuel”, Encyclopedia of Environmental Law (Daniel Farber & Marjan Peeters, ed, pending 2015); “Biofuel and Advanced Biofuel”, , UCLA J of Envtl. L. (pending 2015); “Utah’s Fine Particulate Air Pollution Problem”, 2014 Utah L. Rev. Online (2014), available at http://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/utahonlaw; “EPA’s Fine Particulate Air Pollution Control Program”, 44 Envtl. L. Rep. 10-996 (Nov. 2014).
John Ruple authored book chapters on water resource management and land management, and with Kerry Kelly and Jon Wilkey, he co-authored the chapter on air quality and carbon emission management; all three chapters will appear in the forthcoming book, Utah Oil Shale: Science, Technology, and Policy Perspectives (CRC Press 2015). Together with Mark Capone, Professor Ruple published NEPA — Substantive Effectiveness Under a Procedural Mandate: Assessment of Oil and Gas EISs in the Mountain West, 7-1 Geo. Wash. J. Energy & Envtl. L. __ (forthcoming 2016). Professor Ruple and Stegner Center Director Bob Keiter co-authored A Legal Analysis of the Transfer of Public Lands Movement, Stegner Center White Paper No. 2014-2, and The Transfer of Public Lands Movement: Taking the ‘Public’ Out of Public Lands, Stegner Center White Paper No. 2015-01. Forthcoming publications include: When Winning is Losing: Why a State Takeover of Public Lands May Leave States Without the Minerals They Covet, Stegner Center White Paper No. 2015-02 (forthcoming 2015, co-authored with Robert Keiter); Alternatives to Transfer of Public Lands Act Litigation, Stegner Center White Paper No. 2015-03 (forthcoming 2015, co-authored with Robert Keiter); NEPA, FLPMA, and Impact Reduction: An Empirical Assessment of BLM Resource Management Planning in the Mountain West (forthcoming 2016, co-authored with Mark Capone); and Shooting the Albatross: Why a State Takeover of Federal Public Lands Would Make Endangered Species Act Compliance More Difficult (forthcoming 2016, multiple co-authors).
Michele Straube, Director of the Stegner Center’s Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) Program, works to build collaborative problem-solving capacity among law students and within the larger community. She teaches Conflict Management (Spring 2015) and Environmental Conflict Resolution (Spring 2016) in alternate years. Building on a workshop hosted for federal agency staff on iterative NEPA, her co-authored article “iNEPA is the iPhone of Environmental Impact Review: Strategies to Make NEPA More User-Friendly” was published in the Summer 2015 ABA Natural Resources & Environment Journal. Ms. Straube has also been panel moderator and/or seminar coordinator for multiple workshops and seminars on issues ranging from air quality to sage grouse to the importance of ethics and civility in corporations’ interactions with regulators. Ms. Straube continues to work with students designing and facilitating collaborative processes, including SLC Mayor Becker’s Homeless Services Site Evaluation Commission, a site-specific collaboration focusing on sustainable grazing on public lands, and watershed partnerships across the arid southwest.