David E. Adelman

David E. Adelman joined the University of Texas law faculty in 2009. His research focuses on empirical studies of litigation, implementation of environmental laws, and the geographic and distributional impacts of environmental policies. Understanding the limits of science and quantitative reasoning in regulatory policymaking is a recurring theme in his work.

Professor Adelman's articles have addressed such topics as the implications of genomic technologies for toxics regulation, the inequities of environmental citizen suits, the conflicts between private environmental governance and trademark law, and how federalism can be leveraged to promote the innovation that is essential to addressing climate change. His work has been published in numerous law reviews, including Ecology Law Quarterly, Harvard Environmental Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Ohio State Law Review, Texas Law Review, and University of Colorado Law Review. Several of his papers have been selected as among the top three articles of the year by the Environmental Law Institute and for republication as one of the top five articles in the annual issue of the Land Use and Environmental Law Review.

Prior to joining the Texas faculty, he was an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law from 2001 to 2009. Before entering academia, Professor Adelman was an associate with the law firm Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., where he litigated patent disputes and provided counsel on environmental regulatory matters, and a Senior Attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council also in Washington, D.C. He clerked for the Honorable Samuel Conti of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Professor Adelman received his B.A. in chemistry and physics from Reed College, where he was the DuPont Graduate Scholar in Chemistry, received the American Institute of Chemists Student Research Award of Merit, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford University, where he worked in the field of chemical reaction dynamics studying quantum mechanical effects in simple gas-phase reactions. Professor Adelman received his J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School, where he was an articles editor with the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and a research assistant for Professor John Barton.