Tony Derron
- Associate Professor of Law
Tony Derron is an Associate Professor of Law and an environmental law scholar who examines how administration, government structure, and property rules shape environmental outcomes. His work treats environmental law less as a unified field and more as a set of overlapping pathways, from federal regulation to state constitutions, that can inform solutions to problems both inside and outside the field. He teaches Energy Law and Regulation, Civil Procedure, and Administrative Law: Enforcement and Remedies.
Professor Derron’s recent article, Unwritten Administrative Law and the Regulatory Last Mile, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, identifies a structural flaw in cooperative federalism. Federal statutes like the Clean Water Act are often administered by state agencies operating under state administrative law. Through a comprehensive fifty-state survey, he demonstrates that this body of law is undeveloped on basic questions of how agencies make policy, change positions, or refuse to act. As a result, core federal programs run in the shadow of judicial doctrine that often does not exist.
His article Environmental Rights, Original Meaning, and the Separation of Powers, forthcoming in the Utah Law Review, turns from administration to state constitutions. Drawing on ratifying debates and archival research from constitutional conventions and legislative debates in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Montana, and Hawai‘i, the article reconstructs what citizens and framers intended when they enshrined a right to a clean and healthful environment in the 1970s. That lens helps inform how state government, from courts to agencies, should engage with state institutional design and the recent judicial enforcement of these rights.
Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Derron was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Before that, he served at the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, where he spearheaded the office’s multistate environmental efforts and represented state agencies in litigation and rulemakings. Immediately after law school, he clerked for Chief Judge Philip A. Brimmer on the United States District Court for the District of Colorado and for Justice William W. Hood III on the Colorado Supreme Court. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.S. in Business and Political Economy from NYU Stern School of Business. An avid rock climber, you will likely find Professor Derron adventuring on the Flatirons and other geological playgrounds outside of work.