Professor of Law
Michael J. Klein Chair in Law
Faculty Co-Director, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
William Boyd is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Boyd is also a Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
Boyd was previously Professor of Law and John H. Schultz Energy Law Fellow at University of Colorado Boulder School of Law. His primary research and teaching interests are in energy law and regulation, climate change law and policy, and environmental law. Much of his recent scholarship has been motivated by two related concerns: (1) how particular ways of thinking have structured the manner in which problems are framed in energy and environmental law and, in turn, how they have shaped specific regulatory responses; and (2) how particular forms of energy and environmental governance are emerging in the context of a plural, fragmented and increasingly global set of institutions and actors.
Professor Boyd continues to be actively involved in climate, energy, and environmental policy matters at multiple levels of governance. Since 2009, he has served as the Project Lead for the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF), a unique subnational collaboration of 38 states and provinces from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Spain, and the United States that is working to develop regulatory frameworks to reduce emissions from deforestation and land use. Boyd is also the founding Director of the Laboratory for Energy & Environmental Policy innovation (LEEP), a policy innovation lab based in Boulder, Colorado that works with partners around the world to develop and support real-time policy experiments, establish robust networks for learning and exchange, and contribute to effective and durable policy outcomes.
Professor Boyd received his B.A. from University of North Carolina, where he was a Morehead Scholar, his M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, and his J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he served as Articles Editor of the Stanford Law Review. After law school, Boyd clerked for the Honorable Diana Gribbon Motz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. He then served as American Association for the Advancement of Science Congressional Science Fellow and Counsel on the Democratic minority staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, and practiced energy, environmental, and climate change law with the firm of Covington & Burling, LLP in Washington D.C.
Professor Boyd’s recent scholarship has appeared in UCLA Law Review, Ecology Law Quarterly, and the Yale Journal on Regulation among others. His 2015 book The Slain Wood: Papermaking and its Environmental Consequences in the American South was awarded the 2016 Edelstein Prize by the Society for the History of Technology.