Today we share some bittersweet news. At the end of the spring semester, three of our extraordinary faculty will depart Colorado Law for their next exciting chapters. Here, we are pleased to celebrate their many achievements and wish them our very best.

Professor Ming Hsu Chen:

“The University of Colorado has provided me a place to define myself as a scholar, and it has provided meaningful opportunities to build a community of interdisciplinary race and immigration scholars across the university,” remarked Professor Chen. “The Front Range has become a dynamic place for immigrants and racial diversity. I'm glad to have played a small part in its transformation."

Professor Chen will join the faculty at the UC Hastings College of Law, where she has been serving as a visiting professor for the 2021-22 school year. She continues in her position as co-editor for the Immigration Prof blog () and in leadership roles for the AALS Immigration Law section and the Law and Society Association's Citizenship and Migration section.

Professor Chen's book, Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era, was the subject of the Byron R. White Center's Rothgerber Symposium in 2021 and a Talk in 2020.  Prior to joining the legal academy, Professor Chen clerked for the Honorable James R. Browning on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. She earned degrees from the University of California Berkeley (Ph.D 2011), New York University Law School (JD 2004), and Harvard College (AB 2000)."

Professor Sharon Jacobs:

“The thing I will miss most about Colorado Law is our remarkable student body,” reflected Professor Jacobs. “The enthusiasm our students show for the law, and the care they show to one another, inspire all of us to do our best work. I am also grateful for the support of my fellow faculty, and for their generosity of spirit and tireless commitment to the scholarly project.”

Professor Jacobs's research focuses on the impact of regulatory structure and process on policy outcomes in energy and environmental law at the federal and state levels. In 2017 Jacobs earned the Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award, which recognizes an emerging junior environmental law professor who exhibits scholarly excellence and promise at an early stage in his/her career. In 2020, Professor Jacobs began administering and overseeing a new website, EnergyTradeoffs.com, a website that publishes scholarly treatments of the energy transition and fosters nuanced, constructive dialogue around that transition.

She was previously a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and an associate in the energy and environmental regulatory groups at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Iowa Law Review, among other publications. Professor Jacobs graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2009, where she was the Executive Articles Editor of the Harvard Law and Policy Review. Prior to attending law school, Professor Jacobs was a professional classical cellist and holds a master’s degree in Music Performance from the Juilliard School and a bachelor's degree in Music Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Susan Nevelow Mart:

Since she joined the Colorado Law faculty in July of 2011, Professor Mart has been a source of great wisdom and collegiality in the community. She has written and presented nationally and locally on the effects of algorithms on legal research, legal information policy, national security and libraries, access to information, computer information retrieval systems, and legal research pedagogy.

“Law Librarianship has been my favorite career,” remarked Professor Mart.  “And the support of the faculty and staff at Colorado Law has been a major part of making my career as a law librarian so enjoyable. I am proud to be part of the Colorado Law community.”

In 2004, 2007, and 2018, her superior scholarship received the Article of the Year Award from the Law Library Journal, law librarianship's premier journal. She currently teaches Writing and Research in the Regulatory Context, Advanced Legal Research and Analysis and Environmental Legal Research. She has been on the Board of Directors of LawArXiv, the Society of American Law Library Directors, and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance. She serves as the Chair of the Government Relations Committee of the Colorado Association of Law Libraries and is active in advocating on information policy issues on behalf of libraries and the public.

Before joining Colorado Law, Professor Mart served as the Faculty Services Librarian and adjunct professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Prior to her work at Hastings, Professor Mart practiced law for seventeen years. Professor Mart holds an M.L. I.S. from San Jose State University, a J.D. from Berkeley Law School at the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

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Today’s conversations around the transition to clean energy often neglect a fundamental issue: the costs associated with those decisions. A new website, EnergyTradeoffs.com, administered and overseen in part by  Associate Professor Sharon Jacobs, aims to promote awareness and discussion of the energy transition and its associated trade-offs.

"It’s easy when we talk about energy policy to focus on a single goal and downplay the effect of pursuing that goal on other things we care about," Jacobs said. "What we are trying to do on this site is to acknowledge that making changes to our energy grid will have a number of different consequences."

EnergyTradeoffs.com is jointly operated by Jacobs and energy law professors David Spence, University of Texas; James Coleman, Southern Methodist University; Shelley Welton, University of South Carolina; and Jim Rossi, Vanderbilt University. The website features interviews with scholars working on projects concerned with the energy transition and its trade-offs, with a particular focus on research in governance, affordability, reliability, and the construction of new energy infrastructure.

While the site doesn’t put forward any particular view about what our energy system should look like, Jacobs believes that we need to move to a greener, better coordinated grid as quickly as possible through incorporation of technologies like energy storage and advanced metering infrastructure.

But we can’t pretend that there are no costs associated with this transition, she said.

"Instead of pretending that we can achieve all we want while maintaining low electricity rates, avoiding all environmental impact, and keeping everyone in the jobs they have right now, let’s find creative ways to address the problems the green transition will inevitably create."

"Instead of pretending that we can achieve all we want while maintaining low electricity rates, avoiding all environmental impact, and keeping everyone in the jobs they have right now, let’s find creative ways to address the problems the green transition will inevitably create."

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Removed from the hustle and bustle of teaching, summer is an opportune time for faculty to advance their research and scholarship in collaboration with other legal scholars. Several Colorado Law faculty members hosted workshops and conferences on campus this summer, convening top scholars to share innovative research on legal issues against the scenic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. 

Conferences like these are among the many ways Colorado Law faculty engage in scholarship and research. Below are highlights of the faculty-hosted �鶹ӰԺ Summer Workshops that took place this summer.

Intersectional Environmentalism Workshop

Moses Lasky Professor of Law Sarah Krakoff hosted the Intersectional Environmentalism Workshop June 14 to address issues of environment, race, and inequality. Participants included Shalanda Baker (Northeastern School of Law), Ann Eisenberg (University of South Carolina School of Law), Sharmila Murthy (Suffolk Law School), and Michalyn Steele (BYU Law School).

Colorado Law alumni and students Edyael Del Carmen Casaperalta ('18), Leah Vasarhelyi ('21), and Natasha Viteri ('21) also participated in the workshop.

"As we hurtle toward surpassing dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time live in a world marked by extreme economic inequality, the time is right to reshape discussions about environmental law so that they always automatically include questions of inequality, racial discrimination, and redistribution," said Krakoff, who also serves as interim executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. "One way to think of this is that we are participating in the broader movement to provide intellectual support for the 'Green New Deal.'"

Early Career Energy Scholars Workshop

On June 14 and 15, Associate Professor Sharon Jacobs hosted the second Early Career Energy Scholars Workshop at Colorado Law. The workshop brings together young energy law scholars from around the country to share and receive feedback on early-stage drafts. This year, participants from nine different law schools attended, workshopping drafts on topics including property rights in oil and gas, wholesale electricity market governance, and energy justice.

Junior Criminal Law Workshop

Organized by Associate Professor Benjamin Levin, the Junior Criminal Law Workshop, held June 29-30, provided an opportunity for junior criminal law and procedure scholars to engage with each other’s work as a supportive, but critical community. Each participant shared a work in progress, and the other participants read and provided feedback. The workshop also served as a site to initiate or continue longer-term conversations about criminal justice scholarship and teaching. Participants included criminal law scholars from Harvard, Yale, NYU, Penn, University of Richmond, Wayne State, and UNLV.

Junior Business Law Colloquium

Associate Professor Brad Bernthal hosted the Junior Business Law Colloquium (JBLC) July 11 and 12. This year’s attendees include business law scholars from Notre Dame, University of Illinois, University of Florida, and several other law schools.

Started by Professor Andrew Schwartz nine years ago, the JBLC is an intimate scholarly workshop for a dozen of the most promising junior business law scholars in the country. Participants must be pre-tenure or have just received tenure. Each participating scholar submits an original piece of scholarship. All participants read each article and provide comments and feedback.

When they weren’t exchanging ideas, the group took in the beauty of �鶹ӰԺ in the summer with a tubing trip down �鶹ӰԺ Creek.

"Five of this year’s JBLC courageous scholars attempted to tube �鶹ӰԺ Creek during their time at Colorado Law.  Only one of the five succeeded. While a few professors took back bruises following the JBLC, everyone was OK. But our guests were humbled by the power of �鶹ӰԺ Creek during a big runoff year," Bernthal said.

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On an Energy Tradeoffs podcast, Professor Sharon Jacobs talks about how different actors privilege different values in energy policy and argues that scholars should be explicit about which values they are privileging.

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The Sandgrund Bi-Annual Award for Best Consumer Rights Work recognized Associate Professor Sharon Jacobs for her article, 43 Ecology Law Quarterly 519 (2016). Established by Ron Sandgrund (’82), the award encourages research and writing in the field of consumer rights.

Jacobs’ article focuses on electric energy and the ways in which the law struggles to keep up with changing realities, such as increasing overlap between consumer and producer. Drawing on her expertise in energy and administrative law, Jacobs identifies the problem of the “energy prosumer” and several doctrinal and procedural problems that prosumers create, including jurisdictional puzzles, distributional concerns, and democratic challenges. Jacobs’ article argues for new regulatory approaches that address these problems and advance important norms in electricity law, including environmental protection and market competition.

Associate Professor Justin Desautels-Stein received the Gamm Justice Award for his work in progress "The Canon Reloaded: Equality and Exclusion in the History of International Legal Thought." The award was established by �鶹ӰԺ attorney Gordon Gamm to encourage faculty to explore issues related to critical issues in “justice” broadly defined.

In this piece, Desautels-Stein takes an historical perspective to modern controversies in international theory and practice. Focusing on libertarian and neoliberal justifications for U.S. counterterrorism actions after 9/11, Desautels-Stein notes certain parallels to arguments attempting to justify European imperialism in the past. Grounded in jurisprudential thought, Desautels-Stein’s book argues for “human equality” as an ordering principle for international law and successfully advances the goal of educating legal audiences about certain historical foundation of justice.

Finally, Professor Aya Gruber received the Jules Milstein Faculty Scholarship Award for her article, 103 California Law Review 2 (2015). This award, along with support for students, is funded by a gift from Marvin Wolf (’54) creating an endowed fund in memory of his father-in-law, Jules Milstein.

Gruber’s article discusses the “provocation defense,” a criminal law doctrine that mitigates murder in some cases on the theory that the victim provoked the defendant’s actions. Feminist scholars have argued that the provocation defense treats sexist killers too leniently, discriminates against women, and instantiates violence. Gruber both takes these critiques seriously and stakes new ground by claiming that the critiques may overestimate provocation’s effect on gender inequality and underestimate its value to marginalized defendants. The article engages deeply in contemporary debate over law and order, mass incarceration, and race and gender justice as they impact courts and law reform today.

This year’s Faculty Scholarship Retreat was generously sponsored by Hugh Gottschalk (’79), partner and president of Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell LLP.

Read more about research and scholarship by Colorado Law faculty here.

Pictured (L-R): Dean Jim Anaya, Sharon Jacobs, Aya Gruber, Justin Desautels-Stein

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