The University of Texas School of Law is pleased to announce the second major tenured appointment of the academic year: Professor Wendy E. Wagner, one of the nation's top young environmental lawyers, who currently teaches at Case Western Reserve University, will join the UT faculty in fall 2000. Professor Mark Ascher, formerly of the University of Arizona College of Law, accepted an offer to join the faculty this January.
"We are delighted that Professor Wagner has accepted our offer," said Dean M. Michael Sharlot. "Her arrival will give Texas the largest and one of the most distinguished faculties in environmental law in the United States." UT professors Lynn E. Blais, Thomas O. McGarity '74, Ernest Smith, and Gerald Torres, as well as regular visiting professors Antonio Benjamin of Brazil and Francesco Francioni of Italy, all teach and write in the environmental law area.
Professor Wagner received a Masters of Environmental Studies in 1984 and her law degree in 1987, both from Yale, where she was Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Regulation. After clerking for the Honorable Albert J. Engel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, she practiced for four years, first as an Honors Attorney in the Enforcement Division of the Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division, and then as Pollution Control Coordinator with the Department of Agriculture's Office of the General Counsel.
She began teaching law at Case Western in 1992, and was promoted to full professor there in 1997. In spring 1999, she was a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University School of Law, and she will serve as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School in spring 2001. Professor Brian Leiter, Chair of the Law School's Lateral Appointments Committee, notes, "Before hiring Professor Wagner, we reviewed several years worth of her teaching evaluations, from both Case Western and Vanderbilt. She consistently received outstanding marks from her students in all classes."
Since 1995, she has authored or co-authored thirteen articles, essays, and book chapters, and has established herself as the nation's leading authority on the use of science by environmental policy-makers. Indeed, her influential article on "The Science Charade in Toxic Risk Regulation" (Columbia Law Review, 1995) was chosen as one of the five best environmental law articles of the year and reprinted in the Land Use and Environmental Law Review. She is currently one of seven lawyers serving on the American Bar Association's National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists.
Among her other important publications are "Congress, Science and Environmental Policy" (University of Illinois Law Review, 1999), "Breast Implants Revisited: Beyond Science on Trial" (Wisconsin Law Review, 1997) (co-author), "Choosing Ignorance in the Manufacture of Toxic Products" (Cornell Law Review, 1997), and "Ethyl: Bridging the Science-Law Divide" (Texas Law Review, 1996).
Dean Sharlot concludes, "Professor Wagner embodies both the excellence in scholarship and the excellence in teaching that we strive for in appointments to this faculty. We look forward to welcoming her to the University of Texas."