Sara Gosman
As a member of the faculty at the University of Arkansas School of Law, Professor Sara Gosman teaches and writes in the areas of environmental and energy law. Her courses include environmental law, energy law and policy, and natural resources law. Her research explores the ways in which uncertainty about risk creates both challenges and opportunities for policy, and spans such diverse topics as oil and natural gas development, children’s health and environmental justice, and water use in the Great Lakes region. She is an expert on the law and policy of hydraulic fracturing, and has written on chemical disclosure as a response to uncertainty about environmental effects of the technique.
Before joining the faculty in Arkansas, she taught at the University of Michigan Law School in the Environmental Law and Policy program.
From 2011 to 2012, Gosman conducted research with Michigan Law students on the legal framework governing oil and gas development in the Great Lakes Basin. The project, “Oil & Gas Development at Home: A Legal Analysis of Threats to the Great Lakes Basin,” focused on oil pipeline safety and hydraulic fracturing of wells, and was co-sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation and funded by the National Sea Grant Law Center. Gosman was an assistant attorney general in the environment, natural resources, and agriculture division of the Michigan Department of Attorney General. She was a member of the State of Michigan's Environmental Justice Working Group from 2008 to 2010.
Gosman earned an AB with high honors in 1996 from Princeton University and a JD, cum laude, in 2001 from Harvard Law School, where she was senior editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review. Through a dual degree program she also earned a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Gosman clerked for Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the Northern District of California. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to research the role of environmental organizations in Hungary's transition to democracy, as well as a Luce Scholarship to work with the World Wide Fund for Nature on sustainable development in Indochina.