Profile

Adell L. Amos holds the Clayton R. Hess Professorship and serves as the Executive Director for the Environment Initiative at the UO. She teaches regularly in the nationally ranked Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program, including courses in Water Law, Federal Administrative Law, Environmental Conflict Resolution, and Oregon Water Law and Policy. Her teaching and scholarship have been recognized by the UO Fund for Faculty Excellence and the Hollis Teaching Awards.

Her research emphasizes the jurisdictional governance structures that are deployed for water resources management in the United States and internationally. She focuses on the relationship between federal and state governments on water resource management, the role of administrative agencies in setting national, state, and local water policy, the role of law in developing water policy and responding to change, and the impact of stakeholder participation in water resource decision-making. She is currently working on a multi-year project which focuses on the integration of law and policy into hydrologic and socioeconomic modeling for the Willamette River Basin through a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary effort funded by the NOAA and the National Science Foundation.

Professor Amos earned her B.A in 1995 from Drury College and her J.D. in 1998 from the University of Oregon (Coif). She is a member of the Missouri bar, admitted in 1999.  After law school, Amos clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for The Honorable Procter Hug, Jr. (then Chief Judge).  Amos first joined the faculty in 2005 after practicing environmental and natural resources law with the U.S. Department of Interior. In 2008, Amos returned to Washington DC to serve in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Solicitor for Land and Water Resources at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Amos returned to the UO School of Law in 2011 as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

In her role as Deputy Solicitor, Amos oversaw legal and policy issues involving the nation’s water resources and public lands. She supervised a team of attorneys in DC and across the country providing legal and policy counsel directly to the Secretary of Interior and Deputy Secretary as well as the offices for the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, the Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In particular, she worked directly on water resilience and planning, wilderness policy, the National Landscape Conservation System, renewable energy and its associated water footprint, low-impact hydropower, dam removal efforts including the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative, and many others. Amos returned to UO with renewed energy for the importance of teaching and researching in the area of water resource management, public participation, and the role of law in the policy arena.

Amos first joined the faculty in 2005 after practicing environmental and natural resources law with the U.S. Department of Interior in Washington DC. She worked as an Attorney- Advisor and served as the national lead on water and natural resources issues in the Office of the Solicitor, Division of Parks and Wildlife, where she represented and advised the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service on state and federal water rights and water management issues. Her portfolio included work in most of the major river basins in the United States – including the Klamath, Snake, Columbia, Middle Rio Grande, Mississippi, Colorado, Gunnison, Platte, and others. She provided legal and policy advice on the interaction of state and federal water law with the full range of environmental statutes including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Power Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Her work also included the Park Service Organic Act, the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act, the Reclamation Act, the Flood Control Act among other authorizing legislation for federal agencies.

In addition to her most recent work in the Willamette River Basin, she also has active projects underway addressing the status of state instream flow programs throughout the Western United States, the impact of legal decision-making on public policy dispute resolution efforts in water-conflict basins, and strategic efforts to protect water resources for national public lands including the National Wildlife Refuge System, the National Park System and the newly created, National Landscape Conservation System. She has published broadly in the field of water law including, most recently “Scope and Limitations of Drought Management within Complex Human-Natural Systems” co-authored with William K. Jaeger, David Conklin, Christian Langpap, Kathleen Moore, and Andrew Plantinga, in Nature Sustainability and "Scarcity Amid Abundance: Water, Climate Change, and the Policy Role of Regional System Models," co-authored with William K. Jaeger, Daniel P. Bigelow, Heejun Chang, David R. Conklin, Roy Haggerty, Christian Langpap, Kathleen Moore, Philip W. Mote, Anne Nolin, Andrew J. Plantinga, Cynthia Schwartz, Desiree Tullos, and David T. Turner, (Willamette Water 2100 Project) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (peer reviewed).

Amos’ research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy, Nature Sustainability, as well as many law reviews and journals.  She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Rivers Fund.  In recognition of her work on water law and policy, she served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Environmental Law at Vermont Law School and has been a frequent keynote speaker and panelist for a wide range of organizations including the National Judicial College, Washington University, American Water Resources Association, the Oregon Legislative Caucus, the Federal District Court Conference, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and the Wingspread Foundation.  Her work has received funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Commerce – NOAA Fisheries, Natural Resources Defense Council, the NorthLight Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of the Interior – Bureau of Land Management, Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, among others.