Richard Frank '74 to Teach Environmental Issues at King Hall in Spring 2010
Richard Frank '74, executive director of the California Center for Environmental Law & Policy (CCELP) at the UC Berkeley School of Law, will return to King Hall in Spring 2010 to teach California Environmental Issues and Environmental Practices as a visiting professor. The King Hall alumnus is a nationally renowned scholar in the fields of environmental, land use, water, energy, constitutional, and public law.
Following his graduation from UC Davis School of Law, Frank worked as a staff attorney for the Federal Energy Administration in Washington, D.C., and in 1976, he began what would be a 30-year career in California government, working for the California Energy Commission as a staff counsel, then with the California Department of Justice as a deputy attorney general in the Land Law Section and as chief assistant attorney general in the Public Rights Division. In 2003, he became chief deputy and the top legal adviser to the Attorney General, overseeing all civil and criminal litigation within the state Department of Justice until 2006.
Frank, who has taught a seminar on environmental issues at Berkeley since 2005, signed on as the first executive director of the CCELP in 2006. He has also taught as a professor at Lincoln Law School of Sacramento and in stints as a visiting professor at King Hall. His publications include The Takings Issue: Constitutional Limits on Land Use Control and Environmental Regulation (with Meltz and Merriam, 1998); "Inverse Condemnation Litigation in the 1990's - The Uncertain Legacy of the Supreme Court's Lucas and Yee Decisions" in the Journal of Urban & Contemporary Law (1993); "The Public Trust Doctrine" in California Environmental Law (1989); and "Forever Free: Navigability, Inland Waterways, and the Expanding Public Interest" in the UC Davis Law Review (1983). He has won numerous honors for his work, including the Marvin Award for Public Service from the National Association of Attorneys General (2005) and the James Jones Public Service Award from the Conference of Western Attorneys General (2001).
In 2006, the UC Davis School of Law established the Richard M. Frank Environmental Law Writing Prize to honor Frank for his contributions to environmental law practice and education. Each year, the prize recognizes outstanding writing by a UC Davis School of Law student in the area of environmental law and policy.