Faculty Updates


Nov 01, 2012 | Stegner Center

Bob Adler published an article in the Florida Law Review entitled Balancing Compassion and Risk in Climate Adaptation: U.S. Water, Drought and Agricultural Law, and has had articles accepted for publication in the Washington University Law Review (The Ancient Mariner of Constitutional Law: The Declining Role of Navigability) and the George Washington Journal of Energy and Environmental Law (Water and Wastewater Infrastructure in the United States: The Clean Water-Energy-Climate Nexus). He also contributed chapters that will be included in several books, including Agriculture and Forestry, in Research Handbook on Climate Adaptation Law (Edward Elgar Publishing); Managing Water Supplies, in Adaptation to Climate Change and the Law: U.S. and International Aspects (ABA); and Restoration and Law in Ecosystem Management, in Ecosystem Management and the Law (Univ. Akron press). He is currently co-authoring a new water law casebook with Professor Craig and Noah Hall from Wayne State University Law School. He also wrote a book review for the Journal of Environmental Studies on Royal Gardner’s excellent new book on wetlands law and policy. Over the past year Bob gave presentations at the University of Colorado, University of New Mexico, and George Washington University law schools, and has talks scheduled this fall at Vermont Law School and the University of Washington Law School. He was also the principal faculty organizer of last year’s Stegner Symposium Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson, on which he worked closely with Stegner Center Associate Director Jan Nystrom, and coached the National Environmental Law Moot Court Team. Finally, Bob was very honored to receive the College of Law’s Faculty Scholarship Award at commencement. 

Robin Craig published two books–Comparative Ocean Governance: Placed-Based Protections in an Era of Climate Change and the Third Edition of Environmental Law in Context in early summer 2012. She is currently working on a new textbook, Modern Water Law, with colleague Bob Adler and Professor Noah Hall, and has completed book chapters entitled “Coastal Water Quality” for the forthcoming Second Edition of the ABA’s Coastal and Ocean Law; “Energy System Impacts,” for the forthcoming The Law of Adaptation to Climate Change; “Marine Protected Areas and the Resilience of Marine Ecosystems,” with Terry Hughes of Australia’s James Cook University, for the forthcoming Resilience and the Law; and “New Sustainable Governance Institutions for Estuaries and Coasts,” with Vanderbilt law professor J.B. Ruhl, for Ecological Economics of Estuaries and Coasts (2012). Her most recent articles have appeared or will be appearing in Diversity, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Climate Law, the George Washington Journal of Energy and Environmental Law, Southwestern Law Review, Environmental Law, and the BYU Law Review. Since January, she has presented at the University of Utah’s Global Change and Ecosystem Center, the Stegner Center’s Annual Symposium, the George Washington University’s Clean Water Act Symposium, the Canadian Bar Association’s National Environmental, Energy, and Resources Law Summit, and the Environmental Law Collaborative Workshop. She also helped organize the AALS Midyear Meeting on “Tort, Environment, and Disaster” and participated as a senior scholar reviewer at the University of Washington’s Junior Environmental Workshop. In Fall 2012, she will be presenting at the University of Tulsa, the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists’ annual meeting, the University of Akron, Northwestern University, the “Restore America’s Estuaries” conference, Indiana University–Bloomington, and the Roger Williams School of Law. 

Lincoln Davies was awarded the prestigious McCloy Fellowship in Environmental Policy by the American Council on Germany.  As a McCloy Fellow, Davies will travel to Germany to conduct a comparative study of German and U.S. renewable energy laws.  Davies’ recent publications include three articles on renewable energy: “State Renewable Portfolio Standards: Is There a ‘Race,’ and Is It ‘To the Top’?,” in the San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law; “Incentivizing Renewable Energy: Assessing Renewable Portfolio Standard and Feed-in Tariff Design and Performance” in the KLRI Journal of Law & Legislation; and “Reconciling Renewable Portfolio Standards and Feed-in Tariffs,” forthcoming in the Utah Environmental Law Review.  In addition, Davies published the article “Beyond Fukushima: Disasters, Nuclear Energy, and Energy Law” in the B.Y.U. Law Review, and he presented a work-in-progress article, “Energy Law and the Gospel of (In)efficiency” at the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington.  Davies also presented work at Stanford Law School, the University of Texas, the Nineteenth Annual Utah Water Law Conference, the Stegner Center’s Electric Power in a Carbon Constrained World conference, and to the J. Reuben Clark Law Society.  He was the keynote speaker at Utah Clean Energy’s Tenth Anniversary Gala.  Earlier this year, Davies was reappointed as Chair of the ABA’s Energy Infrastructure and Siting Committee.

Leslie Francis spent Spring Semester as an invited visitor at Oxford University (UK), where she was working primarily on health information privacy, particularly comparing policies in the U.S. and the EU.  She has a number of papers in press on privacy issues, including the use of identifiable data in surveillance and justice in the use of health data.  Francis co-chairs the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. She also is an elected vice-president of the International Society for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.  This year, she has given invited talks at Oxford University, Sheffield University, the Federal University of Pernambuco (in Recife, Brazil), the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, the International Association of Bioethics, and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. 

Bob Keiter was elected President-Elect of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation at the Foundation’s annual trustee meeting. He will serve as Vice President for 2012-13, and then serve a one-year term as President beginning in July 2013. Keiter’s recent publications include a book chapter on “Wildlife Conservation, Climate Change, and Ecosystem Management,” an article on “Wildfire Policy, Climate Change, and the Law,” an article entitled “Lessons from Nine Mile Canyon: Achieving Consensus over Energy Development on Public Lands,” and essays in the George Wright Forum, Pacific Historical Review, and Ranger magazine. He recently spoke at the National Parks Summit in Washington, DC, and is serving on a National Park Service Advisory Board subcommittee on new parks and landscape conservation. 

Nancy A. McLaughlin, Robert W. Swenson Professor of Law, just finished serving a three-year term as Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at the College of Law. In addition to her administrative duties, Professor McLaughlin has continued to be a leader in the development of conservation easement law and policy. With the help of a colleague affiliated with Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Professor McLaughlin organized the first annual Protected in Perpetuity Roundtable, which took place at the Montage in Deer Valley, Utah, in May of 2012. The Roundtable brought together a diverse group of stakeholders (including IRS representatives, State Attorney General representatives from ten states, conservation easement donors, and land trust representatives from national, regional, state, and local organizations) to discuss the legal and policy challenges associated with protecting land in perpetuity with conservation easements. One participant referred to the Roundtable as an “historic event.” 

Professor McLaughlin is revising the chapter on conservation easements in Powell on Real Property, the leading real property treatise in the United States. She continues to work on her book forthcoming in Oxford University Press, entitled In Perpetuity: The Future of Conservation Easements. And she has an article on the need for federal guidance to protect the public investment in perpetual conservation easements forthcoming in the Florida Tax Review, one of the top peer-reviewed tax law journals in the country.  

Professor McLaughlin also continues to speak frequently on issues relating to conservation easements at a variety of venues. She was invited to speak about her innovative research endeavors at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Program on Academic and Research Institutions as Conservation Catalysts. She was invited to speak to the Utah State Bar and at the ABA’s Real Property, Trust and Estate Law annual symposium. She presents each year at the Land Trust Alliance national conference (which will take place this year in Salt Lake City in October). She also frequently presents on conservation easement-related and other issues at American College of Trust and Estate Counsel meetings. This fall she will be an invited participant in a conference on charitable deduction reform at NYU’s National Center on Philanthropy and the Law, and she will present on her organization of the Roundtable at the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action Annual Conference on Re-examining Philanthropy. In the spring she will present at the Annual Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning at the University of Miami School of Law, and at the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s annual conference at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. 

Professor McLaughlin is also organizing this year’s Wallace Stegner Center Academic Symposium, entitled The Future of Conservation Easements: What Were We Thinking and Where Do We Go From Here? The symposium will bring nationally recognized experts in tax law, property law, and the laws governing charities and charitable gifts to the law school to discuss the challenges associated with the use of perpetual conservation easements as a land protection tool. 

Arnold Reitze authored several articles, including  “EPA’s Proposed New Source Performance Standards to Control Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Electric Utility Generating Units,” in Environmental Law Review; “The Role of NEPA in Fossil Fuel Resource Development and Use in the Western United States” in the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review; and “Bad News, Good News, Controlling Greenhouse Gases From Highway Vehicles,” in Utah Environmental Law Reporter. He also served as a member of the U’s Institute for Clean and Secure Energy and as Vice-chair, ABA’s Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Ecosystems Committee. He was the keynote speaker at the Institute for Clean and Secure Energy annual meeting, providing an “Update on Climate Change Legal Developments.” He was the planning chair and a speaker for the Stegner Center program, “Electric Power in a Carbon Constrained World.”  

John Ruple joined the Stegner Center from the University of Utah’s Institute for Clean and Secure Energy, where he worked on Department of Energy funded research.  Together with Professor Robert Keiter, John recently completed two reports for the DOE: Lands with Wilderness Characteristics, Resource Management Plan Constraints, and Land Exchanges — Cross-Jurisdictional Management and Impacts on Unconventional Fuel Development in Utah’s Uinta Basin, and Conjunctive Surface and Groundwater Management in Utah — Implications for Oil Shale and Oil Sands Development. 

Together with Professor Robert Adler, John is finalizing a book chapter on water and climate change for an American Bar Association compilation on climate change adaptation (Michael Gerrard and Katrina Kuh, eds.).  Together with Professor Lincoln Davies and Stegner Center Fellow Kirsten Uchitel, John completed Understanding Barriers to Commercial-Scale Carbon Capture and Sequestration in the United States: An Empirical Assessment (forthcoming 2012).  John also published Water for Power in the Twenty-First Century: What a Growing Population, Changing Climate, and Energy Development Mean for Utah’s Water Resources, 33 Utah Env’tl. L. Rev. ___ (2012), and Energy Development Within Indian Country: Working Within the Realm of Indian Law and Working Towards Collaboration, 32 Utah Env’tl. L. Rev. 1 (2012) (co-authored with Heather Tanana). 

John also presented at the University of Utah’s Unconventional Fuels Conference: Lands with Wilderness Characteristics — Impacts on Oil Shale and Oil Sands Development (May 2012), and the Stegner Center’s Electric Power in a Carbon Constrained World: Water for Electric Power in a Carbon Constrained World (Feb. 2012). 

Michele Straube joined the Stegner faculty in February 2012 as Founding Director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program.  She has taught as an adjunct at the law school over the past ten years (Conflict Management, Environmental Conflict Resolution) and was recently appointed a Lecturer.  Ms. Straube has extensive experience as a practicing environmental attorney, working in environmental enforcement, private practice and as a policy consultant for all levels of government.  For the past fifteen years, she has maintained a private mediation practice in Utah, designing and facilitating consensus-building processes on environmental and natural resource issues. 

Ms. Straube has recently issued a written Report Card on Environmental Dispute Resolution in Utah, based on personal interviews and survey results from a broad cross-section of stakeholders involved in environmental and natural resource issues in Utah.  The grade?  Incomplete, but showing improvement. .  The Report Card will be published in the Journal on Environmental Law and Litigation (Winter 2013 issue).  Ms. Straube has also been asked to be on the “Environmental Conflict Resolution: A Report Card” panel at the January 2013 American Association of Law Schools (AALS) annual meeting.


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