"Goodbye to the Public-Private Divide": 18th Distinguished Visitor Eric Freyfogle

On September 24, 2005, Lewis & Clark Law School was pleased to host Distinguished Visitor Eric T. Freyfogle for a provocative public lecture, "Goodbye to the Public-Private Divide." Professor Freyfogle focused on the inequitable origins of private property in developing his thesis that many problems in land management in the West stem from obsolete distinctions between public and private lands. In fact, he said, there is a public interest in private lands and a private interest in public lands. His scholarly article on this topic and his vision for novel collective management schemes will be published in Environmental Law.

Eric Freyfogle is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. For more than 20 years he has taught courses on property, natural resources, wildlife law, land use planning, and environmental law and policy. A native of central Illinois, he has long been active in state and local conservation groups and currently serves as President of Prairie Rivers Network, the Illinois affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation. His writings include five dozen articles in scholarly and popular publication as well as several books: The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Island Press, 2003), an inquiry into the private ownership of nature; Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning a New land Ethic (Island Press, 1998), which received the 1999 Adult Nonfiction Award of the Society of Midland Authors; and Justice and the Earth (The Free Press, 1993). He served as editor of The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Island Press, 2001), co-edited a volume of writings by Aldo Leopold on land conservation in agricultural landscapes – For the Health of the Land (Island Press, 1999); and is co-author of Wildlife Law: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 2002). A forthcoming book, tentatively entitled Taking Conservation Seriously: Nature, Intellect, and the Human Prospect, is being published by Yale University Press in 2006. In January 2004 Freyfogle was appointed editor of the Leopold Conservation Papers Project, an effort to edit and publish in thematic volumes the conservation writings of Aldo Leopold.