Bradley Karkkainen

Bradley C. Karkkainen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Professor Karkkainen is a nationally recognized authority in the fields of environmental and natural resources law. Professor Karkkainen teaches courses in environmental law, international environmental law, natural resources law, water law, land use, property, administrative law, and regulatory theory.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota faculty, Professor Karkkainen held a visiting appointment at the University of California-Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 2002-03, and was Associate Professor at Columbia Law School in New York City from 1995 to 2003. He has also taught courses for European lawyers at Columbia Law School’s Columbia-Amsterdam Program in the Netherlands, and for conservation biology graduate students at Columbia University’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC).

In 1994-95, Professor Karkkainen clerked for the Hon. Patricia M. Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit.  Professor Karkkainen is a principal investigator in the Project on Public Problem-Solving (POPPS), an interdisciplinary collaborative research effort at Columbia, Harvard, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota that is investigating innovative regulatory designs and mechanisms for public service delivery across a variety of policy domains. In the summers of 2002 and 2004, Professor Karkkainen held an appointment as Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Marine Policy Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a leading center for marine science and policy studies.

Professor Karkkainen is the author of numerous monographs, book chapters, and articles in leading legal and social science journals. His research centers on innovative strategies for environmental regulation and natural resources management, with an emphasis on mechanisms that promote continuous adaptive learning, flexibility, transparency, and policy integration.

Professor Karkkainen holds a B.A. in philosophy (1974) from the University of Michigan, and a J.D. (1994) from the Yale Law School, where he taught legal research and writing as a teaching assistant in 1993-94 and served as an editor of both the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law.