Erin Ryan is Associate Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School where she teaches federalism, environmental and land use law, property, and negotiation. She taught at the University of California-Hastings College of the Law before joining the full-time law faculty at The College of William and Mary in 2004. She was awarded a Fulbright grant to study multijurisdictional governance in China for the 2011-12 academic year, and she joins the faculty at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College thereafter. Ryan is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Hewlett Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. She clerked for Chief Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Professor Ryan has presented on federalism theory at academic and administrative venues in the United States, Europe, and Asia, such as the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. She advised National Sea Grant interjurisdictional governance projects involving the Chesapeake Bay watershed and consulted with the United States Air Force and various universities on developing sustainability programs. She has appeared on National Public Radio, in the Chicago Tribune, the London Financial Times, and other news outlets, and in the PBS Newshour and Christian Science Monitor's Patchwork Nation project.