Please join us for the latest installment in the ELPP Lecture Series. Professor Alexandra Klass from the University of Minnesota Law School will discuss recent developments in U.S. energy law, policy, economics, and technology. Although President Trump and his cabinet Secretaries, particularly at the Interior Department, Energy Department, and Environmental Protection Agency, have announced dramatic policy shifts away from those pursued during the Obama Administration, the new administration’s ability to accomplish its goals is in some instances helped and in other instances hindered by existing federal and state laws as well as private sector technology and economic trends. Topics will include the shift away from the use of coal and toward natural gas and renewable energy in the electricity sector; the use of federal public lands to develop oil, natural gas, coal, wind, and solar energy; developments in technology and law associated with hydraulic facturing ("fracking"); and controversies over new oil and gas pipelines such as the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines.

This event is free and open to the public.

Professor Alexandra B. Klass teaches and writes in the areas of energy law, environmental law, natural resources law, tort law, and property law. Her recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric grid, transportation electrification, oil and gas transportation infrastructure, and the use of eminent domain for electric transmission lines and pipelines. She is a co-author of Energy Law: Concepts and Insights Series (Foundation Press 2017), Energy Law and Policy (West Academic Publishing 2d ed. 2018), Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases (Wolters Kluwer, 4th ed., 2018), and The Practice and Policy of Environmental Law (Foundation Press, 4th ed. 2017). Professor Klass was named the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year for 2009-2010, and she served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2010-2012. She was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2015. She is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and in prior years was the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law and the Solly Robins Distinguished Research Fellow.

Prior to her teaching career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law, natural resources, and land use matters. During her years in private practice from 1993-2004, she handled cases in federal and state trial and appellate courts involving contaminated property, wetlands, environmental review, mining, environmental rights, zoning, eminent domain, and environmental torts. She clerked for the Honorable Barbara B. Crabb, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin from 1992-1993.