Professor Karen Bradshaw, William H. Pedrick Scholar at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, is the 16th annual Stegner Center Young Scholar. Professor Bradshaw will deliver her Young Scholar Lecture on November 11, 2020 on “Wildlife as Property Owners.” Professor Bradshaw will explore how existing legal solutions to stem catastrophic biodiversity loss are failing and ask if the answer to saving plants and animals rests in property law. Given that securing habitat through trusts allows animals to own the land they live on, as participants in the system of property, Professor Bradshaw will argue that this surprisingly bi-partisan solution answers some of the most pressing land concerns in the West.
Professor Bradshaw will join the College of Law remotely, given the University of Utah’s Covid-related restrictions on travel and live events. Details about her presentation, including a link to the Webinar for her lecture, are available on the Stegner Center online calendar. Her Young Scholar Lecture will be published in the environmental and natural resources law issue of the student-edited Utah Law Review.
“Professor Bradshaw’s work in the intersection between natural resource law and property law, overlaid with her background in economics, is bringing fresh insights into such matters as wildlife management, wildfire policy, and landscape conservation. We look forward to her virtual visit and the opportunity to share her knowledge and ideas with our Stegner Center audience,” remarked Bob Keiter, Director of the Stegner Center. In commenting on being selected as this year’s young scholar, Professor Bradshaw said, “The American West is the central character in my writing; the hidden thread that runs through my research. I am honored and humbled to receive the Stegner Center Young Scholar Award. Robin Kundis Craig and Robert Keiter–giants in the field of natural resources–have become mentors and friends. To receive this award from the Center with which they are both affiliated is a tremendous honor.”
In addition to her faculty position at ASU’s O’Connor College of Law, Professor Bradshaw is also a Faculty Affiliate Scholar at the New York University School of Law Classical Liberal Institute and Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Bradshaw has published over twenty academic articles. She is the author of the book Wildlife as Property Owners: A New Conception of Animal Rights and contributing co-editor of Wildfire Policy: Law and Economic Perspectives.
Bradshaw’s work was nationally recognized in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020 as being among the top articles in the fields of Environmental Law, Administrative Law, Land Use Law, and Natural Resources Law. In 2018, New York University and Indiana University co-hosted a two-day interdisciplinary symposium centered on the theory of overlapping resources developed in Bradshaw’s 2015 article, Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources. The peer-reviewed International Journal of the Commons devoted a volume to the resulting theory of overlapping property rights, which Bradshaw co-guest-edited.
Media outlets including NPR’s Planet Money, Fortune, Bloomberg, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and The Arizona Republic, have featured, mentioned, or drawn upon Bradshaw’s research. Bradshaw has presented at workshops and conferences at Columbia University, New York University, University of Chicago, Oxford University, and Yale University.
Bradshaw graduated with a JD, with honors, from University of Chicago Law School, where she was a law review editor and Tony Patino Fellow (recognizing character and public service). Bradshaw clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the Fifth Circuit and spent two years as a research fellow at New York University School of Law. Prior to law school, she earned an MBA from California State University, Chico and a BS in Business Administration from University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Chancellor Scholar. Bradshaw is a co-founder of THE AGGREGATE, which connects women in law. Bradshaw is from a former lumber mill town of 1,200 people at the base of Mt. Shasta, California, to which she returns each summer.
The Young Scholars Program, which is made possible by the generous support of the Cultural Vision Fund, is designed to recognize and establish a relationship with promising scholars early in their academic careers. Recipients are selected based on their accomplishments, the quality of their academic work, and their promise in the field of environmental and natural resources law and policy.
Past Stegner Center Young Scholars include: Professor Jason Robison, University of Wyoming College of Law Professor Uma Outka, University of Kansas School of Law; Professor Felix Mormann, Texas A&M University School of Law; Professor Sanne Knudsen, University of Washington School of Law; Professor Dave Owen, UC Hastings College of Law; Professor Emily Hammond, George Washington University Law School; Professor Katrina Kuh, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University; Professor Noah Hall, Wayne State University of Law; the late Professor Lesley McAllister, then at the University of San Diego School of Law; Professor Jason Czarnezki, Vermont Law School (now at Pace); Professor Barbara Cosens, University of Idaho School of Law; Professor Kim Connolly, University of South Carolina School of Law (now at SUNY Buffalo); Professor Jamison Colburn, Western New England College School of Law (now at Penn State); Professor Amy Sinden, Temple University Beasley School of Law; and Professor Reed Benson, University of Wyoming College of Law (now at New Mexico).