Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases, Sixth Edition

BOOKMARK

Authors

Christine A. Klein
Bret C. Birdsong
Alexandra B. Klass
Eric Biber
Dave Owen
Vanessa Casado Pérez

Series / Aspen Casebook Series

BOOKMARK

Book length

1130 pages

Publication Date

2026-09-18

Edition

Sixth Edition

Description

Table of contents

Preface

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Natural Resources Law, Sixth Edition provides a place-based approach for students to explore the expansive body of statutes, rules, customs, institutions, and processes governing the ways individuals, corporations, and local, state, tribal, and national governments interact with water, air, land, wildlife, minerals, parks, forests, and other natural resources. Chapters open with a map marking the geographic location of each case, and all judicial opinions begin with a context-setting, place-based narrative and photograph. This teachable book groups readings into discrete, assignment-sized chunks and accommodates a wide range of pedagogical approaches. For those who want to focus on cross-cutting themes and policy, each chapter includes one or more discussion problems that apply the chapter’s cases to a contemporary policy issue or dispute. For those who want to get into the nitty-gritty details of the law, each chapter presents statutory and regulatory excerpts in standalone, easily referenced sections, rather than scattered throughout the text.

New to the Sixth Edition:

Expanded treatment of climate change, tribal rights, and contemporary resource conflicts throughout the book.
Discussion of the significant shifts in federal energy policy on public lands in light of the transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration.
A substantially revised Chapter 1 introducing the field through recurring themes such as climate change, environmental justice, and governance fragmentation.
Significant revisions to Chapter 3 addressing the demise of Chevron and the rescission of the CEQ NEPA regulations. Older materials on NEPA reform have been replaced with a newer discussion of proposals for permitting reform and reducing environmental review for projects on public lands, particularly renewable energy projects.
Removal of Chapters 15 (Wetlands and Streams) and 16 (Natural Resources and Fifth Amendment Takings), leaving those topics to other law school courses on environmental law, water law, and property law.
New principal cases including Held v. State; Environmental Defense Center v. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County; Bennet v. Spear; Kleissler v. United States; Sierra Club v. Espy (II); Sierra Club v. Glickman; Sierra Club v. Marita; Healthy Gulf v. U.S. Department of Interior; Nantucket Residents Against Turbines v. U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; Stronghold v. United States; and Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida v. United States.
Updated/new discussion problems, including:
- Invasive species and the question of what “natural” means in natural resources law (Chapter 1)
- Applying the materials on Section 4 (listing) of the ESA to two case studies (wolverines and sage-grouse) (Chapter 13)
- Addition of discussion problems to Chapter 13 (Wildlife and the Endangered Species Act) to guide students through the statutory and regulatory framework and connect with real world problems
- Climate change and water resources (Chapter 14)

Professors and students will benefit from:

Place-based approach—conveys passion and drama fueling resource disputes and policy and brings to life judicial analysis and statutory interpretation
Broad national coverage—includes both traditional public lands issues and broader natural resource topics of interest to both eastern and western students
Factually rich discussion problems in each chapter—based on a contemporary dispute or policy issue

Table of Contents

Summary of Contents

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1
Natural Resources Law: Introduction and Recurring Themes

PART 1
FEDERAL LANDS
CHAPTER 2
Federal Lands: An Introduction
CHAPTER 3
Federal Agencies: Authority and Limits
CHAPTER 4
Non-Federal Power on Federal Lands
CHAPTER 5
Forests
CHAPTER 6
Rangelands
CHAPTER 7
Hard Rock Minerals
CHAPTER 8
Energy and the Federal Lands: Making Policy for the Future
CHAPTER 9
Parks, Monuments, Wilderness, and the Roadless Resource

PART 2
NON-FEDERAL LANDS
CHAPTER 10
Tribal Lands and Resources
CHAPTER 11
Public Trust Doctrines
CHAPTER 12
Private Lands: Conservation Transactions

PART 3
ACROSS THE BOUNDARIES
CHAPTER 13
Wildlife and the Endangered Species Act
CHAPTER 14
Water

Table of Cases
Table of Statutes and Regulations
Index

Preface

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About the authors

Christine A Klein

Professor

University of Florida

Christine Klein is the Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. She began her career as a water rights litigator in the Colorado Office of the Attorney General. Prior to joining the UF Law faculty, Klein served on the faculty of Michigan State University College of Law and directed its environmental certificate program.

Her legal experience includes positions as a law clerk for the U.S. District Court, District of Colorado; as a law clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Office of Staff Attorneys (San Francisco summer position); and as a clerk at Goodwin Proctor (formerly Shea & Gardner) in Washington, D.C. Klein has served on two committees of the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, that studied sustainable water and environmental management in the California Bay-Delta.

Bret Birdsong

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Bret Birdsong is a professor of law at UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. Professor Birdsong earned his J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in 1993. After clerking for Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr., of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Professor Birdsong joined the United States Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division, as a trial attorney focusing on public land and natural resources litigation from 1994-2000.

As an Ian Axford Fellow in Public Policy in 1998, he studied New Zealand's specialized Environment Court and served as a visiting fellow in the office of New Zealand's Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

Professor Birdsong teaches Environmental Quality Law, Public Lands and Natural Resources Law, Administrative Law, Property, and Civil Procedure. His research focuses on federal land and resources management.

Alexandra B. Klass

Professor

University of Minnesota Law School.

Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes in the areas of energy law, environmental law, and natural resources law. In 2022 and 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Demonstrations at the U.S. Department of Energy. Professor Klass’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory and permitting challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2022, Professor Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she was a member of the faculty from 2006 to 2022. She has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Prior to her academic career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation. For more details on Professor Klass’s background and publications, please see https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/alexandra-klass.

Eric Biber

Prof.

Berkley

Eric Biber’s teaching and research interests as a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley are environmental law, natural resources law, energy law, land-use law, federal Indian law, administrative law, and property. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2006, he worked as a litigator in the Denver office of Earthjustice, a public-interest nonprofit organization specializing in public lands and other environmental cases. Biber taught public lands law as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in fall 2005. He is a member of both the Colorado and California bars. Biber earned a master’s of environmental science with a focus in conservation biology from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, Biber clerked for Judge Carlos Lucero of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver and Judge Judith Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Biber’s scholarship has appeared in a wide range of law reviews, including the University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, University of Colorado Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, Environmental Law, NYU Environmental Law Journal, and Administrative Law Review. Biber has published in several leading peer-reviewed natural science and social science journals, including Society and Natural Resources, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, Ecography, and Science. At Berkeley, Biber teaches courses in Property, Public Lands and Natural Resources Law, Biodiversity Law, Federal Indian Law, Energy Law, Land-Use Law, and Environmental Law and Policy. He also helps lead the Environmental Law Writing Seminar. He is the Director of the Environmental and Energy Law Programs at Berkeley.

David Owen

Professor Dave Owen teaches courses in environmental, water, land use, energy, and administrative law. His interest in the subject area began when he was about six years old and his parents denied him access to all television except for PBS wildlife specials. He then became inordinately interested in poachers. He went on to study geology in college, primarily because the labs were outside, and became an environmental consultant. During one hot summer day of hazardous waste site sampling, while sweating miserably in a Tyvek suit and inhaling aniline fumes, he decided graduate school sounded like a nice idea. So he became an environmental lawyer. He went to Berkeley Law, where he served as editor-in-chief of Ecology Law Quarterly and was selected for the Order of the Coif.

Professor Owen went on to clerk at federal district court and then work for a small law firm in San Francisco, where his practice focused primarily on water law. He worked on Colorado River allocation, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta litigation, and federal state disputes over the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, among other matters. In 2007, he began teaching at the University of Maine School of Law. He joined the Hastings faculty in 2015.

His research focuses primarily on water resource management, and some recent projects have addressed groundwater-surface water interactions, the environmental consulting industry, taxation of water consumption, the roles of federal regional offices, stream protection under the Clean Water Act, and policies to expedite dam removals and hydropower upgrades. Four of his articles have been recognized by his peers as among the top environmental law articles of their respective years; another article has won the Morrison Prize as the top sustainability law article of its year; and he has presented three articles at the Harvard-Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum. He also contributes to the Environmental Law Prof Blog.

In his spare time, Professor Owen was once a passably competent ultimate frisbee player. Now he mostly runs on trails, a bit slower with each passing year. He lives in Albany with his wife Megan, a pediatric occupational therapist, his two children, and a dog named Allie.

Product Information

Edition

Sixth Edition

Publication date

2026-09-18

2026

Pages

1130

Print + eBook

9798894108414

eBook

9798894108407

Subject

Environmental Law, Elective , Environmental Law

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