James Salzman
Samuel F. Mordecai Professor of Law and Nicholas Institute Professor of Environmental Policy
Jim Salzman holds joint appointments at Duke University as the Samuel Fox Mordecai Professor of Law at the Law School and as the Nicholas Institute Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment. In more than sixty articles and five books, his broad-ranging scholarship has addressed topics spanning trade and environment conflicts, the history of drinking water, environmental protection in the service economy, wetlands mitigation banking, and the legal and institutional issues in creating markets for ecosystem services. A popular classroom teacher, Professor Salzman has twice been voted Professor of the Year by students at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. He has lectured on environmental policy in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. He has served as a visiting professor at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, as well as at Macquarie (Australia), Lund (Sweden), and Tel Aviv (Israel) Universities and the European University Institute (Italy).
An honors graduate of Yale College and Harvard University, Professor Salzman was the first Harvard graduate to earn joint degrees in law and engineering and was named a Sheldon Fellow upon graduation. He has both government and private sector work experience. Prior to entering academia, he worked in Paris in the Environment Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and in London as the European Environmental Manager for Johnson Wax. His honors include election as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1995, as well as appointments as a McMaster Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia in 2002-2003 and as a Bren Fellow at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara in 2004.
He has published four casebooks, including International Environmental Law and Policy, Foundation Press (with D. Zaelke and D. Hunter, 1998, 3rd ed. 2007), the leading casebook in the field with adoptions at over 160 schools, and The Practice and Policy of Environmental Law, Foundation Press (2008, with J.B. Ruhl and J. Nagle). His publications have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, Penn Law Review, California Law Review, NYU Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and other legal, scientific and popular journals. A national survey of environmental law professors has voted his work among the top ten articles of the year on four separate occasions. Professor Salzman is active in the fields of practice and policy, serving since 1996 as a principal liaison for the Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee, a government-appointed body providing counsel to the EPA and US Trade Representative on trade and environment issues. He serves on the boards of five environmental non-profits.