The Law's Great Strength

Former CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus is James H. House and Hiram H. Hurd Professor of Environmental Regulation; Faculty Co-Director, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment; and Director, Environmental Law Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Doremus has taught a variety of classes in the areas of environmental law, natural resources law, land use, and property. In addition to her law school teaching, she has taught at the Bren School of Environmental Management at UC Santa Barbara, in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, and in the Graduate Group in Ecology at UC Davis. Her writing has largely concentrated on the protection of nature, biodiversity, and endangered species; conflicts between biodiversity protection and water use in the arid west; the role of science in environmental law; management of public lands and public resources; and the relationship between private property rights and environmental regulation.

While in academia, Professor Doremus has been a consultant to the CalFed Bay Delta Program, a novel intergovernmental effort to protect the ecological resources of the San Francisco Bay-Delta system while minimizing disruptions to the local farming communities and municipal water users. She has been a member of two National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council advisory committees, one on the use of adaptive management by the Army Corps of Engineers and the other on the protection of endangered species in the PlatteRiver basin. She has also been a part of multi-disciplinary research initiatives examining the FERC licensing process, the future of the S.F. Bay-Sacramento Delta, and ocean governance in California.

Professor Doremus began her legal career as a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She then practiced law at a small firm in Corvallis, Oregon. A substantial part of her practice was devoted to land use law. While in practice, she did pro bono environmental law work for local citizen groups and the National Wildlife Federation. Since joining the faculty at U.C. Davis she has not been in active practice, but has done consulting work for the National Audubon Society's California chapter.

Professor Doremus has published widely in the areas of environmental and natural resource law. Her latest book is Water War in the Klamath Basin: Macho Law, Combat Biology, and Dirty Politics (Island Press 2008), co-authored with CPR Scholar Dan Tarlock.

Before moving into law, Professor Doremus was trained as a biologist. She holds a Ph.D. in Plant Physiology from Cornell University, where she was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow. After earning her PhD, she worked as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research focused on plant metabolism, with particular attention to the pathways by which the building blocks of DNA are produced.