JAMIE PLEUNE portrait
  • Research Associate Professor, College Of Law - Dean
  • Associate Professor of Law (Research), College Of Law
  • Wallace Stegner Center Fellow, College Of Law

Research Summary

Professor Pleune researches the implementation of environmental law and the practical problems that arise along the way. Her scholarship addresses agency decisionmaking, the National Environmental Policy Act, permitting, public land management, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity preservation. Her scholarship has prompted an invitation to offer Congressional testimony and has appeared frequently in Environmental Law Reporter as well as other law reviews.

Education

  • L.L.M., Law, Georgetown University Law Center
  • J.D., College of Law, University of Utah
  • B.A., Political Science, Colorado College

Biography

Jamie Pleune is a research fellow with the Wallace Stegner Center, focusing on issues of climate change and conservation. Jamie Pleune first joined the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law as an Associate Clinical Professor in 2011, after finishing a teaching fellowship at Georgetown University Law Center with the environmental section of the Institute for Public Representation. From 2011 through 2015, Jamie taught Environmental Practice and directed the Environmental Law Clinic. She also engaged in private practice, ultimately becoming a shareholder at the law firm of Richards, Brandt, Miller, Nelson. 
 
Jamie graduated magna cum laude from Colorado College with a B.A and received the Edith Bramhall Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Political Science. She received her J.D from the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah where she won numerous awards for academic achievement including the College Award, the Stephen Traynor Legal Writing Award, the Khazeni Memorial Fellowship, and the Robert W. Swenson Fellowship. She also received the Order of the Coif.  She was also a note and comment editor for the Utah Law Review.
 
Following graduation, Pleune served as a law clerk to Justice Jill Parrish on the Utah Supreme Court.  Subsequently, she worked as staff attorney and Clinical Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Public Representation, Georgetown University Law Center in Washington D.C., where she also earned her LLM.
 
Prior to attending law school, Jamie worked as a ballot drive initiative coordinator for the Nature Conservancy, a backcountry guide for adjudicated youth in Montana, an AmeriCorps volunteer in Montana, and as a deckhand in the Virgin Islands.  In 2016, Jamie took a short sabbatical from law and earned her commercial helicopter license. After flying helicopter tours in L.A. and doing flight instruction in British Columbia for a few years, she re-engaged with environmental law. She serves on the board of an aviation museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan.