Jeffrey Bain Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law

• Property, 
• Public Lands and Resources Law, 
• American Legal History, 
• Natural Resources Law, 
• Native American Natural Resources Law, 
• Graduate Environmental Law Seminar, 
• Public Trust Law Seminar, 
• Pacific Salmon Law Seminar, 
• Water Law,
• Constitutional Law

B.A. cum laude with departmental honors 1972 Williams College
J.D. honors 1976 George Washington University Law School
LL.M. highest honors 1979 George Washington University Law School

Professor Blumm is one of the architects of the Law School’s acclaimed Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program. He has been teaching, writing, and practicing in the environmental and natural resources law field for thirty-five years. He came to the law school in 1978 after practicing with an environmental group and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., where he helped draft the EPA’s wetland protection regulations. Initially, he was a Natural Resources Law Fellow; he was appointed to the faculty the following year. Professor Blumm’s chief interests are in the restoration of the Pacific Northwest salmon runs, the preservation of the West’s public lands and waters, the management of natural resources by Indian tribes, and governmental authority to regulate private property for public purposes.

For over a decade, Blumm edited the Natural Resources Law Institute’s Anadromous Fish Law Memo. More recently, he spent seven years co-directing, with Professor Janet Neuman, the Northwest Water Law and Policy Project. He is a prolific scholar, with over one-hundred articles, book chapters, and monographs on salmon, water, public lands, wetlands, environmental impact assessment, public trust law, and constitutional takings law, to name just a few subjects. His most recent articles concern several on the public trust doctrine, a critique of the Supreme Court’s suggestion that courts could be liable for taking private property, an analysis of a case interpreting 19th century Indian treaties to impose fish habitat protection, and two book reviews on the origins of environmental law.  Ongoing projects include articles on dam breaching, salmon protection under the Endangered Species Act, the influence of the Columbia River Gorge on natural resources law, a reinterpretation of the Indian Law doctrine of discovery, and the role of cultural change in Property law.

In 1992 and 1993, Dartmouth Publishing and New York University Press published Blumm’s anthology on environmental law, and his 2002 book on salmon law and policy, Sacrificing the Salmon (http://www.powells. com/biblio/1-9075228252- 0), met with critical acclaim. Professor Blumm is co-author of the first casebook on Native American Natural Resources Law, originally published in 2002 and now in its second edition. He is author of two chapters in the Waters and Water Rights treatise (on reserved water rights and the Columbia River Basin), and designed and taught the first  courses on Native American Natural Resources Law and Pacific Salmon Law. He works closely with students: over a recent two-year period, twelve of his students published articles, many of whom were his co-authors.

Blumm was visiting professor at the University of Melbourne in 1988, Fulbright Professor at the University of Athens in 1991, and visiting professor at the University of California-Berkeley in 2004. He has lectured on a variety of topics in Australia, Canada, and Brazil and has been a distinguished visitor at Florida State University, the University of Calgary, and Vermont Law School.  He also also served as a board member of WaterWatch of Oregon and American Rivers Northwest. In 2005-07, Blumm was Chair of the American Association of Law School’s Natural Resources Law Section.