Katherine Trisolini

JD, with distinction, Stanford Law School
MA, University of California at Berkeley
BA, Oberlin College

Background

An environmental law scholar, Professor Trisolini’s research focuses on regulatory responses to climate change. She also holds a position as an invited fellow at the UCLA School of Public Affairs Program on Local Government Climate Action Policies.

Prior to joining the Loyola faculty, Trisolini was an Environmental Law Fellow at UCLA School of Law from August 2007 to July 2009. At UCLA, in addition to conducting research on climate change policy, she taught environmental law, a seminar on local governments and the environment, the environmental law clinic, and seminars on the judicial process.

Trisolini practiced environmental law as an Associate Attorney at Chatten-Brown & Carstens in Santa Monica from March 2004 to July 2007 and as a Fellow at Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger in San Francisco. She clerked for then Chief Judge Consuelo B. Marshall of United States District Court for the Central District of California and for the Honorable A. Wallace Tashima of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Trisolini graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School where she was a teaching assistant for Dean Paul Brest’s course on Decisionmaking and Professional Judgment and for Professor Laurence Friedman’s undergraduate political science course on the American legal system. She served on the Stanford Law Review and the Stanford Journal of International Law. While in law school she worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of General Counsel, and the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project. 

Selected Scholarship

• "What Local Climate Change Plans Can Teach Us about City Power," reprinted in Mohamed Salih (ed.) Local Climate Change and Society. Routledge (forthcoming 2012).
• "The Sweet Taste of Defeat:  American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut and Federal Greenhouse Gas Regulation," 30 UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 227 (2012).
• "All Hands on Deck: Local Governments and the Potential for Bidirectional Climate Change Regulation," 62 Stanford Law Review 669 (2010).
• "What Local Climate Change Plans Can Teach Us about City Power," 36 Fordham Urban Law Journal 863 (June 2009).
• "Cities, Land Use and the Global Commons: Genesis Power and the Urban Politics of Climate Change," (with J. Zasloff) in Adjudicating Climate Change: Sub-National, National, and Supra-National Approaches, W. Burns and H. Osofsky eds., Cambridge Univ. Press (2009).
• "NEPA, CEQA, and Climate Change," 2007 Cal. Env. L. Rep. 213.
• "The Endangered Species Act and Intrastate Species: Recent Commerce Clause Challenges to Federal Power to Protect Biodiversity," 2005 Cal. Env. L. Rep. 101.