Education
- J.D. , Law, University of Utah
- M.S., Resource Development, Michigan State University. Project: Treaty Implied Rights to Habitat Protection: Impacts on the Elwha River Controversy (Thesis)
- B.A., Demography / Sociology , Western Washington University
Biography
John Ruple is a Research Professor of Law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, and Director of the Law and Policy Program in the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment. His scholarship focuses on management of the roughly 600 million acres of federal public lands that are found in the eleven contiguous Western states and Alaska. John returned to the College of Law for the fall semester of 2024 after serving as Senior Counsel in the White House Council on Environmental Quality where he provided legal advice on a range of issues involving federal public land management and preservation, mining law and critical mineral supply chain reform, transnational water pollution control, and National Environmental Policy Act review implementation. John has published widely on topics including permitting reform and national monument protection, and his work appears in leading academic journals including Nature Sustainability, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, and U.C. Berkeley’s Ecology Law Quarterly. He has served in federal and state government, worked in private practice, and volunteered on non-profit boards. He is committed to bringing his diverse experiences to bear in finding practical and balanced solutions to seemingly intractable natural resource management problems.