A Faculty Book Talk & Wallace Stegner Center event

EVENT DETAILS:

Join us for a faculty book talk with Professor Brigham Daniels, co-author of Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law.

The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet’s biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation. Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States.

Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America’s colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change. Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.

PANELISTS:

Brigham Daniels, Professor of Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. Brig Daniels is an expert in environmental and property law. At the College of Law, he is Co-Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment and heads up its Great Salt Lake Project. His current scholarship focuses on policy responses to help save Great Salt Lake and on the history of environmental law. Daniels has received research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. He has won several teaching awards. He teaches courses including water law, environmental law, natural resources, property, and torts. He has also taught seminars on environmental topics and helps run the College of Law’s Environmental Policy Accelerator. Outside of the classroom, Daniels has served on the boards of several environmental nonprofits and has represented and consulted for a wide range of public, nonprofit, and commercial entities. Daniels graduated from Stanford Law School. He also earned a PhD from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He received a MPA and undergraduate degree from the University of Utah, where he also was awarded a Harry S Truman Scholarship. Prior to returning to the University of Utah, he taught at BYU Law, the University of Houston Law Center, and was a lecturing fellow at Duke Law School.

Jennifer Napier-Pearce is currently chief of staff at the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, one of the oldest and largest private philanthropic organizations in Utah. Previously she served as a senior advisor and director of communication to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, providing strategy and policy support. Prior to public service, Jennifer was executive editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, where she led the newspaper’s groundbreaking transition from a for-profit business to a nonprofit entity —  the first newspaper in the U.S. to do so — and supported the team that won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize. She has received numerous honors including the Governor’s Award for Excellence, Communicator of the Year by the Utah PIO Association, University of Utah Service to Journalism Award, and dozens of state and regional journalism awards. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah and a master’s degree from Stanford University.

The views expressed in this lecture and in the event description are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of the S.J. Quinney College of Law or the University of Utah.

For questions about this event, email events@law.utah.edu.

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The S.J. Quinney College of Law is pleased to provide CLE opportunities for attorneys. All donations welcome to support our programs.

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