Environmental law scholar 'Buzz' Thompson offers lecture at Law School

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Cynthia D. Quinn, (808) 956-7966
Interim, Associate Dean for Student Services, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Beverly Creamer, (808) 389-5736
Media Consultant, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Posted: Nov 9, 2012

Barton 'Buzz' Thompson
Barton 'Buzz' Thompson
Stanford University Law School Professor Barton ‘Buzz’ Thompson, a leading authority on environmental and natural resources law and policy, will be in Hawai‘i on Thursday, November 15, to deliver a prestigious lecture at UH Mānoa's William S. Richardson School of Law.

Thompson, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist before joining the Stanford faculty, will deliver the 2012 Distinguished Gifford Lectureship in Real Property from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Moot Courtroom at the Richardson Law School. His lecture is entitled “In All Fairness and Justice.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

Thompson is the Robert E. Paradise Professor in Natural Resources Law at Stanford and the Perry L. McCarty Director and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, as well as serving as a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has contributed a great deal of scholarship on environmental issues including his focus on the future of endangered species.

Law School Dean Avi Soifer said that it is a great honor to have a legal scholar of Thompson’s stature presenting a lecture at the Law School. Soifer said: “It is fitting to have Professor Thompson continue our tradition of having the very best professors from around the world present their current research through this distinguished lecture series.”

This is the tenth year of the Gifford Lectureship initially established by the Gifford Foundation to honor Law School Professor David L. Callies, the Benjamin A. Kudo Professor of Law, and Jerry M. Hiatt (’77), a prominent attorney on the Big Island, for their outstanding work in the field of real property law.

Thompson’s outstanding career includes being appointed by the Supreme Court in 2008 as the special master in Montana V. Wyoming, to resolve an interstate dispute involving the Yellowstone River system. He has served as a member of the Science Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and he currently chairs the board of the Resources Legacy Fund and the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation. He is also a California trustee for The Nature Conservancy and a board member of the American Farmland Trust and the Sonoran Institute. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles.

The free Thursday lecture is currently being presented by the firm of Starn O’Toole Marcus & Fisher, a generous supporter of the Law School in this as well as many other ways. Refreshments will follow the lecture from 5:30-6 p.m.