After working one year as a visiting faculty member, Professor Brig Daniels has officially joined the S.J. Quinney College of Law, specifically the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment.
With 15 years of legal academic experience and as a Salt Lake County native and University of Utah alum, Daniels says he has always longed to teach at S.J. Quinney.
“As an undergrad, I studied in the old law school library and attended events put on by the Wallace Stegner Center. I teach and research about environmental law, and what drew me to the field in many ways was my love for the natural world that I developed in Utah,” Daniels says. “As I begin to teach on a permanent basis at the U, it feels like I have come home.”
Daniels says he likes that S.J. Quinney shares many of his values and interests and that it celebrates both faculty members’ and students’ diversity of experiences and backgrounds.
“The Wallace Stegner Center provides an unmatched opportunity to build on its programming and strengths to further my own passions and interests,” he says.
Though Daniels has written a lot about the challenges of managing shared resources, particularly when facing pressures from competing uses and users, a new passion is the Great Salt Lake.
“Getting water to the lake is critically important. If we do not manage do this this, we could crash a resource of hemispheric importance while at the same time sacrificing our health due to toxic dust from the dried lakebed,” Daniels says.
Students will soon learn even more about the area’s environmental risks as they work with Professor Daniels in a brand-new clinic that allows them to develop policy solutions for increasing the Great Salt Lake’s water levels.
“I hope to spend a good part of the upcoming year engaged with the law school community and much broadly in the ways that law might be able to help save the Great Salt Lake,” Daniels says.
Alumni: We want to celebrate your success. Share your personal and professional accomplishments, and we’ll share them in the Class Notes section of future Res Gestae issues.