Penn State
Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA
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Lara B. Fowler

Lara B. Fowler

Teaching Professor of Law
Director, Sustainability Institute
Chief Sustainability Officer, Penn State
Affiliate Faculty, School of International Affairs

Phone: 
(814) 863-0028
Education: 

J.D., University of Washington, with honors
A.B., Dartmouth College
Harvard Program on Negotiation

Professor Lara Fowler is an attorney and mediator who focuses on environmental, energy, and natural resource law, with a specific focus on water related issues. She has a joint appointment between Penn State Law and the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment where she is working on questions related to water, the Chesapeake Bay, and energy. Prior to joining Penn State, she was an attorney at Gordon Thomas Honeywell LLP in Seattle, Washington, where she focused on mediation and dispute resolution of complex natural resource issues, as well as representing clients facing regulatory hurdles in the environmental and energy fields. She has worked on issues such as who is entitled to store groundwater in the greater Los Angeles area, flooding issues in the Chehalis Basin, Washington State’s second largest river basin, and energy issues in the Pacific Northwest. Before pursuing a legal career, she was a senior water resources coordinator with the Oregon Water Resources Department.

Flood Mitigation for Pennsylvania's Rural Communities: Community-Scale Impact of Federal Policies. (Center for Rural Pa. Sept. 2017; revised April 2018) (with Ryan Baxter et al.)

Reasonable Use?: The Challenges Of Riparianism on Transboundary Groundwater Regulation in the Eastern United States, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCATION (April 2020) (with R.T. Caccese)

Come Hell or High-Water: Challenges for Adapting Pacific Northwest Water Law, 37 PACE ENV'L L. REV. 319 (2020) (with R.T. Caccese)

Melting Ice and Deep Waters: the U.S. and Deep Seabed Mining in the Arctic, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT (2019)(with E. Korkut)

An Overview of Arctic Legal Regime Regarding the Protection of the Marine Enviroment and Some Suggestions, 64 VILLANOVA L. REV. 25 (2019)

Implications of Sea-Level Rise for the Law of the Sea, KMI INT'L J. MAR. AFRS. (2018)

Integrating Law, Science and a Way Forward: Opportunities for Collective Action in a Time of Change, WATER RESOURCES IMPACT (Nov. 2018) (with R.T. Caccese) 

Human Conflicts and the Food-Energy-Water Nexus: Building Collaboration Using Facilitation and Mediation to Managed Environmental Disputes, J. ENVT'L STUD. & SCI. (Feb 2016) (with Xiaoxin Shi)

International Joint Commissions for the Settlement of Water Disputes, in MAX PLANCK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INTERNATIONALL PROCEDURAL LAW (forthcoming 2021) (with A. Swain)

Managing Human Conflicts, in INTRODUCTION TO THE FOOD-ENERGY-WATER NEXUS (2019) (with R.T. Caccese)

Establishment of Multifunctional Riparian Buffers. STAC Publication Number 19-008 (Dec. 2019) (with S. Herbstritt et al)

U.S. Law and Policy and the Biofuel Industry, in THE LAW AND POLICY OF BIOFUELDS (Yves Le Bouthillier et. al. eds., Edward Elgar Publishing 2016)(with Kristina S Dahmann & Paul M. Smith)

Alternative Dispute Resolution, in ABA SEC. ENV'T, ENERGY & NAT. RESOURCES, THE YEAR IN REVIEW 2015 (2016) (with Xiaoxin Shi & Nathan Bracken)

Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Spreading Oil and Gas Wastewater on Roads, 6 J. ENVT'L STUD. & SCI. 104 (2018) (with Travis L. Tasker et al.)

New special master finds for Georgia in most recent round of water dispute, SCOTUSBlog (Jan. 9, 2020)

Water-rights dispute Florida v. Georgia seems to have stalled, SCOTUSBlog (July 2019)

Floods, Fires, Drought and More: The Climate is Changing and Dispute Resolution Tools are Needed(Now!) Indisputably Blog (January 19,2019)