Dave Owen

Bio

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 roles of negotiation in environmental regulation, equity implications of a turn toward community-centered energy governance, groundwater-surface water interactions, 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. Five 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.

Education

• University of California, Berkeley School of Law
  J.D., Law 2002

• Amherst College
  B.A., Geology 1996

Accomplishments

• Environmental Law and Policy Annual Report
  The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Report, a compilation of the top three policy-relevant environmental-law articles of the previous year, will reprint an abridged version of The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law (75 Stan. L. Rev. 137). 2024

• Mary Kay Kane Award for Scholarship
  2024

• Land Use and Environmental Law Review
  The Land Use and Environmental Law Review, a compilation of the top environmental and land use law articles of the preceding academic year, has republished Professor Owen's article "Law, Land Use, and Groundwater Recharge" (73 Stan. L. Rev. 1163). 2022

• Morrison Prize
  Professor Owen's recent paper "Trading Dams", coauthored with The Nature Conservancy's Colin Apse, received the first annual Morrison Prize for sustainability research. The Morrison Prize, sponsored by Arizona State Law School, "seeks to recognize the most impactful sustainability-related legal academic article published in North America during the previous year." 2016

• Land Use and Environmental Law Review
  The Land Use and Environmental Law Review, a compilation of the top environmental and land use law articles of the preceding academic year, has republished Professor Owen's article "Mapping, Modeling, and the Fragmentation of Environmental Law" (2013 Utah L. Rev. 219). 2013

• The Land Use and Environmental Law Review
  The Land Use and Environmental law Review, a compilation of the top environmental and land use articles of the previous academic year, has republished Professor Owen's article "Regional Federal Administration" (63 UCLA L. Rev. 58). 2016

• Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence
  UC Law SF College of the Law 2017

Selected Scholarship

• The Water District and the State
  134 Yale L.J. 1 2024

• Mapping the New Clean Water Act
  385 Science 1414 2024

• Community Energy Exit (with Sharon Jacobs)
  73 Duke L.J. 251 2023

• The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law
  75 Stan. L. Rev. 137 2023

• The Realities of Takings Litigation
  47 BYU L. Rev. 577 2022

• Law, Land Use, and Groundwater Recharge
  73 Stan. L. Rev. 1163 2021

• Coequal Federalism and Joint Federal-State Agencies
  55 Ga. L. Rev. 287 2020

• Consultants, the Environment, and the Law
  61 ARIZ. L. REV. 823 2019

• California Groundwater Management, Science-Policy Interfaces, and the Legacies of Artificial Legal Distinctions
  with Alida Cantor et al., ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS 2019

• The Conservative Turn Against Compensatory Mitigation
  Environmental Law 2018

• Cooperative Subfederalism,
  9 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 177 2018

• Water and Taxes
  UC Davis Law Review 2017

• Little Streams and Legal Transformations
  Utah Law Review 2017

• Regional Federal Administration
  UCLA Law Review 2015

• Trading Dams
  UC Davis Law Review 2015

• Taking Groundwater
  Washington University Law Review 2014