Daniel P. Selmi

BA, Santa Clara University
JD, magna cum laude, Santa Clara University
MPA, Harvard University 

Background

Professor Selmi specializes in Land Use Law, Environmental Law, and Appellate Advocacy.  He holds the Fritz B. Burns Chair in Real Property Law and has been a full-time member of the faculty since 1983.  During 1979 and 1980 he taught as an adjunct at the Law School and also taught during 1979 as an adjunct lecturer at the University of California Irvine.  Professor Selmi served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Loyola from 1990 to 1993. 

Before joining the faculty, from 1976 to 1983 Professor Selmi was as a deputy attorney general in the Office of the California Attorney General, first serving in the Environmental Law Section and then in the Natural Resources Law Section. From 1975 to 1976, he was judicial law clerk to the Honorable Manuel L. Real, United States District Judge for the Central District of California.  During the 1993-94 academic year, Professor Selmi was a Visiting Scholar at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C.

Professor Selmi is the co-author of the casebook Land Use Regulation: Cases and Materials and co-author of the two-volume treatise, State Environmental Law. He is co-editor of the most comprehensive treatise on California environmental and land use law, the six-volume California Environmental Law and Land Use Practice.  His book, Principles of Appellate Advocacy, will be published in fall 2013 by Aspen Publishing.

Professor Selmi is a former chair of the California State Bar Committee (now Section) on Environmental Law and has been a panelist on numerous occasions at the Section's Annual Conference at Yosemite. He has also been a panelist at both the Annual California Land Use Law and Planning Conference and the Los Angeles County Bar Section on Environmental Law's Annual “Super-Symposium.” Most recently, he was a panelist at the First and Second Annual “Little NEPA” Conferences, sponsored by the American Bar Association's Section on Environment, Energy, and Resources. He has been a lecturer at the “Western Environmental Boot Camp,” sponsored by the Environmental Law Institute, which educates new practitioners in the field of environmental law.  He also served the reporter to the Civil Justice Reform Act Advisory Committee for the Central District of California.

Professor Selmi has extensive appellate experience. Over his career he has argued almost 30 cases involving environmental and land use law in the state and federal appellate courts, including four in the California Supreme Court, and he has briefed over 40 cases in those areas.  In 2008, he was elected to membership in the California Academy of Appellate Lawyers.  The Academy, the oldest lawyers' organization in the country dedicated solely to the practice of appellate law, admits members only by election "after rigorous scrutiny of their skill in appellate practice."  In addition, he has served as an expert witness in several land use and environmental law cases, and currently is a court-appointed special master in litigation.

Public Service

• Member (and former Chair), California State Bar Section on Environmental
• Member, Los Angeles County Bar Section on Environmental Law
• Former Chair, Editorial Board, Los Angeles Lawyer Magazine (magazine of the Los Angeles County Bar Association)
• Member, Editorial Board, California Environmental Law Reporter (Lexis Nexis)
• Regular Contributor, Rivista Guiridica Dell-Ambiente, Italian journal on Environmental Law

Selected Scholarship

• Article, The Contract Transformation in Land Use Regulation,” 63 Stanford L. Rev. 591 (2011).
• Co-author, Land Use Regulation: Cases and Materials (with James Kushner and Edward Ziegler) (3d ed.) (2008) (with Teacher’s Manual) (Fourth edition forthcoming in 2012).
• Short Article, “The Year in Review: Ten Environmental and Land Use Cases From 2010,” California Environmental Law Reporter (Feb. 2011) (latest in Professor Selmi's series of “Year in Review” articles published annually since the inception of the Reporter in 1991)
• 2011 Annual Update to State Environmental Law (West) (two-volume treatise updated annually)
• Article, “Themes in the Evolution of the State Environmental Policy Acts,” 38 Urban Lawyer 947 (2006)
• Article, “The Promise and Limits of Negotiated Rulemaking: Evaluating the Negotiation of a Regional Air Quality Rule,” 35 Environmental Law 415 (2005)
• Chapter, “Moratoria and Takings Theory,” in T. Roberts (ed.), Takings Sides on Takings (American Bar Association Section on Local Government Law, 2002) (and 2003 supplement to chapter )
• Article, “Reconsidering the Use of Direct Democracy in Making Land Use Decisions,” 19 UCLA Journal of Environmental Law 293 (2001-02)