Associate Professor of Law

• Negotiations
• Natural Resources law
• Environmental Law
• Land Use
• Property
• Federalism
• Water Law and Policy Seminar

Erin Ryan teaches environmental and natural resources law, water law, property and land use, negotiation, and federalism.  She has presented at academic and administrative venues in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, the U.S.D.A. Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets, and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research.  She has advised National Sea Grant multilevel governance studies involving the Chesapeake Bay watershed and consulted with multiple universities and institutions on developing sustainability programs.  She has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the London Financial Times, the PBS Newshour and Christian Science Monitor’s “Patchwork Nation” project, and on National Public Radio.  She is the author of many scholarly works, including Federalism and the Tug of War Within (Oxford, 2012).

Professor Ryan is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Hewlett Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Research Project.  She clerked for Chief Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before practicing environmental, land use, and local government law in San Francisco.  She began her academic career at the College of William & Mary in 2004, and she joined the faculty at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in 2011.  Ryan spent 2011-12 in China as a Fulbright Scholar, where she taught American law, studied Chinese governance, and lectured throughout the country. 

Prior to law school, she served as a U.S. Forest Service ranger on the Mono Lake District of the Inyo National Forest, east of Yosemite National Park.  She graduated from Harvard College with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and received a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University.