Karen Bradshaw is a public intellectual reshaping the way people relate to nature and one another.

Karen Bradshaw is a writer, mother, and professor. Bradshaw is a Professor of Law and Alan Matthenson Research Fellow at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Arizona State University, a Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Global Institute of Sustainability, a Faculty Fellow at Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and a Faculty Affiliate Scholar at the New York University School of Law Classical Liberal Institute. Prominent national media outlets including Forbes, Fortune, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, National Public Radio, NPR's Planet Money, and The New York Times have featured Bradshaw’s research and writing.

Bradshaw is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Depolarized: How Stakeholder Collaborations are Breaking Gridlock (Columbia) and the internationally acclaimed book Wildlife as Property Owners: A New Conception of Animal Rights (Chicago). Wildlife as Property Owners was featured in the Official 2022 GRAMMY gift bags and was “highly recommended” in a Forbes book review. Bradshaw is the contributing co-editor on the defining book on wildfire law and has published over twenty-five academic articles on a variety of legal topics.

She researches and teaches the legal subjects of Property, Contracts, Environmental Law, Natural Resources, and Biodiversity. Her transdiscplinary work includes collaborations with artists, economists, scientists, philosophers, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. Bradshaw was the Desert Humanities Institute Fellow for 2021-2022 and recipient of the 2020 Stegner Young Scholar Award along with several grants. Bradshaw has served in a variety of leadership roles within government and nonprofit organizations concurrently with her academic appointment, most notably as an Academic Consultant preparing an Office of the Chairman Report for the Administrative Conference of the United States (a bi-partisan federal agency) and her current role in a transdiciplinary working group on the ethics and governance surrounding climate intervention through the National Science Foundation.

Bradshaw earned a JD with honors from University of Chicago Law School, an MBA from California State University, Chico and a BS in Business Administration from University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Regent’s Scholar. She clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and was the Koch-Searle Research Fellow at New York University School of Law. Bradshaw grew up in rural communities of Klamath (population 700) and McCloud (population 1,200) California. She lives in the Sonoran desert and on a working vegetable farm in Oregon.

Her work invites people to radically reimagine the human relationship with nature.