Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases, Fifth Edition

Eric Biber

Biber’s teaching and research interests as a Professor of Law at University of California, Berkeley are environmental law, natural resources law, energy law, land-use law, federal Indian law, administrative law, and property. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2006, he worked as a litigator in the Denver office of Earthjustice, a public-interest nonprofit organization specializing in public lands and other environmental cases. Biber taught public lands law as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in fall 2005. He is a member of both the Colorado and California bars. Biber earned a master’s of environmental science with a focus in conservation biology from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, Biber clerked for Judge Carlos Lucero of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver and Judge Judith Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Biber’s scholarship has appeared in a wide range of law reviews, including the University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, University of Colorado Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, Environmental Law, NYU Environmental Law Journal, and Administrative Law Review. Biber has published in several leading peer-reviewed natural science and social science journals, including Society and Natural Resources, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, Ecography, and Science. At Berkeley, Biber teaches courses in Property, Public Lands and Natural Resources Law, Biodiversity Law, Federal Indian Law, Energy Law, Land-Use Law, and Environmental Law and Policy. He also helps lead the Environmental Law Writing Seminar. He is the Director of the Environmental and Energy Law Programs at Berkeley. Additional information is available here. 

Alexandra Klass

Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes in the areas of energy law, natural resources law, environmental law, tort law, and property law. Her recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory barriers to and opportunities for decarbonizing the nation’s electricity and transportation systems, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. She is a co-author of Energy Law and Policy (West Academic Publishing 3d ed. 2022) (with Davies, Osofsky, Tomain, and Wilson), Energy Law: Concepts and Insights (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2020) (with Hannah Wiseman), and Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases (Aspen 5th ed. 2022) (with Klein, Birdsong, Biber, and Owen). Prior to her teaching career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School. She was a law clerk to the Honorable Barbara B. Crabb, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Additional information is available here.

Christine A Klein

Christine Klein is the Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. She began her career as a water rights litigator in the Colorado Office of the Attorney General. Prior to joining the UF Law faculty, Klein served on the faculty of Michigan State University College of Law and directed its environmental certificate program. Her legal experience includes positions as a law clerk for the U.S. District Court, District of Colorado; as a law clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Office of Staff Attorneys (San Francisco summer position); and as a clerk at Goodwin Proctor (formerly Shea & Gardner) in Washington, D.C. Klein has served on two committees of the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, that studied sustainable water and environmental management in the California Bay-Delta.

Bret Birdsong

Bret Birdsong is a professor of law at UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. Professor Birdsong earned his J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in 1993. After clerking for Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr., of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Professor Birdsong joined the United States Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division, as a trial attorney focusing on public land and natural resources litigation from 1994-2000. As an Ian Axford Fellow in Public Policy in 1998, he studied New Zealand's specialized Environment Court and served as a visiting fellow in the office of New Zealand's Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Professor Birdsong teaches Environmental Quality Law, Public Lands and Natural Resources Law, Administrative Law, Property and Civil Procedure. His research focuses on federal land and resources management.

Dave Owen

Professor Dave Owen teaches courses in environmental, water, land use, energy, and administrative law. His interest in the subject area began when he was about six years old and his parents denied him access to all television except for PBS wildlife specials. He then became inordinately interested in poachers. He went on to study geology in college, primarily because the labs were outside, and became an environmental consultant. During one hot summer day of hazardous waste site sampling, while sweating miserably in a Tyvek suit and inhaling aniline fumes, he decided graduate school sounded like a nice idea. So he became an environmental lawyer. He went to Berkeley Law, where he served as editor-in-chief of Ecology Law Quarterly and was selected for the Order of the Coif.

Professor Owen went on to clerk at federal district court and then work for a small law firm in San Francisco, where his practice focused primarily on water law. He worked on Colorado River allocation, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta litigation, and federal state disputes over the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, among other matters. In 2007, he began teaching at the University of Maine School of Law. He joined the Hastings faculty in 2015.

His research focuses primarily on water resource management, and some recent projects have addressed groundwater-surface water interactions, the environmental consulting industry, taxation of water consumption, the roles of federal regional offices, stream protection under the Clean Water Act, and policies to expedite dam removals and hydropower upgrades. Four of his articles have been recognized by his peers as among the top environmental law articles of their respective years; another article has won the Morrison Prize as the top sustainability law article of its year; and he has presented three articles at the Harvard-Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum. He also contributes to the Environmental Law Prof Blog.

In his spare time, Professor Owen was once a passably competent ultimate frisbee player. Now he mostly runs on trails, a bit slower with each passing year. He lives in Albany with his wife Megan, a pediatric occupational therapist, his two children, and a dog named Allie.