My work has been shaping wildfire law and policy for over a decade. Politicians have drawn upon my work in legislative discussions, advocates have cited it in briefs, and the Department of Interior Office of Policy Analysis has cited my work in wildfire reports.
BOOKS
Wildfire: Law & Economics Policy Perspectives (Routledge, 2012) (presenting work from leading scholars including Henry Smith, Tom, Merrill, Henry Smith, and Kirsten Engle on the legal issues of wildfire).
ARTICLES
A Modern Overview of Wildfire Law, 21 Fordham Envtl. L. Rev. 445 (2010) (overviewing the long-ignored legal issues associated with wildfire and advocating for increased scholarly attention to the subject).
Backfired! Distorted Incentives in Wildfire Suppression, 31 Utah Envtl. L. Rev. 155 (2011) (identifying the divergent incentives of government firefighting agencies and private timberland owners with respect to fire suppression).
New Governance and Industry Culture, 88 Notre Dame L. Rev. 2515 (2013) (introducing the role of private governance among timberland owners in managing American landscape, based upon grant-funded archival research at the Forest History Society at Duke University).
Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources, 100 Iowa L. Rev. 2507 (2015) (co-author Dean Lueck) (introducing the notion that governance strategies for natural resources that can only be managed at a large scale, including a case study of wildfire in various areas of the Untied States).
Settling for Natural Resource Damages, 40 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 211 (2016) (analyzing how the Forest Service assesses costs for suppression and damages, based upon review of documents produced by a Freedom of Information Act request).
Stakeholder Collaborations, __ Az. St. L.J. __ (forthcoming 2019) (describing the 4 Forest Restoration Intiative—4FRI—a stakeholder collaboration devoted to mitigating wildfire risk).
Biodiversity loss is the hidden crisis of our time—one driven by anthropocentric systems of property that fails to take into account animal interests. My work radically reimagines the human relationship with nature. It advancing novel of law, government, and markets to incorporate animal interests that have historically been erased by Western systems of property law.
Some of my writing on wildlife property rights:
Wildlife as Property Owners: A New Conception of Animal Rights University of Chicago Press (University Chicago Press, 2020).
Biodiversity Loss, Viewed through the Lens of Mis-matched Property Rights, International Journal of the Commons (2020) (with Challie Facemire).
Stakeholder Collaborations as an Alternative to Cost-benefit Analysis, 2019 Brigham Young University Law Review (2020).
Humans and Animals, University of Utah Law Review (2020).
Expropriating Habitat, 43 Harvard Environmental Law Review 77 (2019).
Animal Property Rights, 89 University of Colorado Law Review 809 (2018).
Contracting for Control of Landscape-level Resources, 100 Iowa Law Review 2570 (2015) (with Dean Lueck).
Interested in learning more?
Click here for media coverage, book talks, and podcast episodes featuring my work on biodiversity law.
I write about the nexus of sustainability, food, and non-traditional knowledge sources. I believe that the way we eat is one of the largest drivers of our impact on —and relationship to—the environment, and other people. My sabbatical research project is a book exploring the intergenerational transfer of knowledge about sustainable eating, particularly among women.
Using Takings to Undo Givings, 10 N.Y.U. J. L. & LIBERTY 649 (2017).
Everyday people—not just government officials—hold valuable knowledge about the land that they live on. Contrary to general scholarly wisdom about the administrative state, I argue that collaborative land management controls up to 1/3 of the US landscape—most notably for public lands and resources. Land governance is inherently local and inextricably includes socio-ecological judgments. To capture these distinctive features, leading federal land management agencies use stakeholder collaborations to craft public-private solutions for managing landscapes with diverse ownership structures. Collaborative analysis includes diverse voices and perspectives that are erased by cost benefit analysis and other data-driven tools.
My work provides a novel longitudinal description of stakeholder collaborations in the administrative state. I also argue that courts are expert at evaluating decision researched by such collaborations, and provide a doctrinal analysis of stakeholder collaborations. This research is informed by field research on collaborations in Alaska and Arizona to manage caribou herds and wildfires, which I performed as an Academic Consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States (a US federal agency).
Stakeholder Collaboration as an Alternative to Cost-Benefit Analysis, 2019 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 665 (2020).
Agency Engagement with Stakeholder Collaborations, in Wildfire Policy and Beyond, 51 ARIZ. ST. L.J. 437 (2019).*
(Reviewed by Eric Biber, We Need to Work Together: Understanding Federal Agency Collaboration, JOTWELL (Feb. 9, 2021).)
Agency Coordination of Private Action: The Role of Relational Contracting, 6 TEX. A&M. L. REV. 229 (2018) (symposium)
Academic Consultant Author for Government Agency Report: Stakeholder Collaborations for Managing Land & Natural Resources, Administrative Conference of the United States (2017).
I am one of a growing group of interdisciplinary scholars rethinking our model of property. “Mis-matched property rights” “overlapping property rights” and “multidimensional property” are veins of literature that seeks to capture that property is neither as binary nor exclusion-based as conventional wisdom suggests.
All systems of property are simultaneously public, private, and communal because various resources within shared space require different scales of efficient management and thus different tools of governance. Multidimensional property reforms theoretical models to reflect that landowner rights co-exist with the interests of nonhuman neighbors, historic private rights resulting from prior property regimes, and public interests.
Conferences and Journal Volume
In 2019, The Classical Liberal Institute at New York University Law School and Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University co-hosted, Mis-matched Property Rights, a two-day interdisciplinary symposium exploring the influence of Bradshaw’s 2015 co-authored article, Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources on property law, economics, and political science.
In 2020, the International Journal of the Commons published, Overlapping Resources and Mismatched Property Rights, a peer-reviewed symposium volume, to Bradshaw and Lueck’s model of overlapping property rights, which Bradshaw co-guest-edited.
Articles
Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources, 100 IOWA L. REV. 2507 (2015) (co-author Dean Lueck).
Biodiversity Loss, Viewed through the Lens of Mismatched Property Rights, 14 Int’l J. Commons 650 (2020) (with Challie Facemire).+
An Introduction to Overlapping Resources and Mismatched Property Rights, 14 Int’l J. Commons 553 (2020) (with Dean Lueck and William Christmas).+
Virtual Parceling, 14 Int’l J. Commons 597 (2020) (with Bryan Leonard).+
New Governance and Industry Culture, 88 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 2515 (2013).
Backfired! Distorted Incentives in Wildfire Suppression, 31 UTAH ENVTL. L. REV. 155 (2011).
Podcast
International Journal of the Commons podcast episode about overlapping resources and mismatched property rights
Karen Bradshaw, Settling for Natural Resource Damages, 40 HARV. ENVTL. L. REV. 211 (2016).
The United States manages natural resources held in the public trust for the collective benefit of all citizens. When human action injures certain natural resources, the government has statutory authority to pursue monetary damages, which are used to restore the resources to their pre-injury condition. As the only statutory tort remedy in environmental law, natural resource damages provide a valuable opportunity to consider the efficiency of a tort regime as a tool for addressing environmental problems. Moreover, administration of the remedy provides insights into interagency dynamics and valuation of natural resources without a market value. At present, these important inquiries are sharply limited by a lack of comprehensive information about the remedy. Commentators routinely underestimate the frequency and size of claims by failing to account for settlement, which resolves over ninety-five percent of natural resource damages matters, and lesser-known applications of the remedy.
This Article begins to fill the void of information surrounding natural resource damages settlements. It presents a novel empirical overview of all settlements by federal trustees between 1989 and 2015, constructed from data gathered by Freedom of Information Act requests to each relevant agency. The available data indicate that federal agencies settled for $10.4 billion across hundreds of claims over more than twenty years. This Article maps the statutory authorities that agencies use to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Ultimately, the data presented in this Article lay a foundation for the important, yet under-theorized, questions surrounding the potential for statutory tort remedies to address environmental problems.
* Translated into Mandarin and reprinted in the top-ranked Chinese environmental law journal, CHINESE ENVTL. & RESOURCES L. REV., 环境资源法论丛 (forthcoming 2018).
* Reprinted in 54 ROCKY MNT. MIN. L. FDN. J. (2017).
* One of the top natural resources law articles of 2015-2016, selected by peer review.
* One of the top twenty environmental law articles of 2016-2017, selected by peer review.
Expropriating Habitat, 43 HARV. ENVTL. L. REV. __ (forthcoming 2019) (describing the incentives that cause government agencies to continually shift threatened and endangered species to lower-valued lands, including foreign countries).
Agency Coordination of Private Action: The Role of Relational Contracting, __ TEX. A&M. L. REV. __ (forthcoming 2019) (unveiling the substantial role that private actors play in species translocation, and the role of unenforceable contracts—in the form of recovery planning documents—in coordinating public-private efforts).
Animal Property Rights, 89 U. COLO. L. REV. 809 (2018) (arguing that the Endangered Species Act is failing to prevent widespread biodiversity loss due to habitat issues and advocating for a property-rights approach to complement the ESA).
Companies, government, and scholars drive consumer/public behavior by using information science to influence how people engage with issues.
Information Flooding, 48 IND. L. REV. 755 (2015) (describing the phenomena of companies knowingly overwhelming consumers congestive limitations with respect information processing, as with greenwashing false claims of environmental attributes).
The Short-Term Temptations and Long-Term Risks of Environmental Catastrophism, 56 JURIMETRICS J. 234 (2016) (co-authored with Gary Marchant) (warning against the cumulative dangers of desensitizing the public towards environmental harms through repeatedly overstated claims).
Karen Bradshaw, Using Takings to Undo Givings, 10 N.Y.U. J. L. & LIBERTY 649 (2017).
Karen Bradshaw, New Governance and Industry Culture, 88 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 2515 (2013).
