Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan is the Elizabeth C. and Clyde W. Atkinson Professor and Associate Dean for Environmental Programs at the Florida State University College of Law, overseeing the FSU Center for Environmental, Energy, and Land Use Law. She specializes in environmental and natural resources law, water law, property and land use, federalism, and negotiation, and was recognized in 2022 with a university-wide teaching award for Innovation in Teaching.

Ryan has presented widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, the National Association of Attorneys General, the United States Forest Service, and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. She has advised National Sea Grant multilevel governance studies involving Chesapeake Bay and consulted with multiple institutions on developing sustainability programs. She has appeared in the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, London Financial Times, National Public Radio, Thomson-Reuters Beijing, and local NBC and CBS Television News. She is the author of over fifty scholarly works and twenty-five others, including Federalism and the Tug of War Within (Oxford, 2012). She has lectured at leading universities and government agencies in China, India, Japan, Vietnam, Israel, England, Northern Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, and Australia.

Ryan is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Hewlett Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. She clerked for Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before practicing environmental, land use, and local government law in San Francisco. She began her academic career at the College of William & Mary in 2004, joined the faculty at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in 2011, and moved to Florida State in 2015. Ryan served as a Fulbright Scholar in China, where she taught American law, studied Chinese governance, and lectured throughout the country. In 2019, she was selected as a Research Fellow by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and spent the summer in residence there.

Prior to law school, Ryan served as a U.S. Forest Service ranger on the Mono Lake District of the Inyo National Forest, east of Yosemite National Park. She graduated from Harvard College with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and received a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University.