Tara Righetti

Occidental Chair in Energy and Environmental Policies

UW School of Energy Resources
Professor, UW College of Law
Joint appointment in the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources

Tara.Righetti@uwyo.edu | CV | Hill Hall, Rm 451

 

Education

JD, University of Colorado Boulder (2007)
BA, University of Colorado Boulder (2005), Special Honors

 

Background and Expertise

Tara Righetti is the inaugural Occidental Chair in Energy and Environmental Policies, an endowed chair jointly administered by the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources (SER) and the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Righetti is a recognized leader who engages with local, regional and national natural resource agencies and energy regulators, private industry, conservation organizations and communities. Righetti joined UW’s faculty in 2014 and has worked to provide important scholarship for her discipline, informative resources for the Wyoming natural resources community, and educational opportunities for students. She has been an influential legal expert in the Rocky Mountain region, tackling research across the energy spectrum in hydrogen, nuclear, fossil fuel and renewable energy generation, land use and decarbonization.

A prolific writer, Righetti has published peer-reviewed articles in leading law journals both nationally and internationally. Her scholarship is regularly cited for her aptitude and excellence related to policy and regulatory aspects of CCUS, particularly the storage of CO2 in the subsurface and especially in federal pore space -- a topic of significance to Wyoming.

Regularly sought for her expertise and aid on major energy and carbon storage projects nationwide, she is a renowned expert on U.S. energy law. In 2018, she was appointed as a trustee-at-large with the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation and was awarded tenure in the UW College of Law in 2020.

Newly returned from the Centre de Recherche Droits et Perspectives du Droit at the University of Lille College of Law in France, Righetti completed a year of collaborative research as a Fulbright Scholar. During her year abroad, she worked with faculty on projects related to the international governance of CCUS, including integration of CCUS in the circular economy and the certification of carbon removal from CCUS under European Union law.

 

Select publications

K.K. DuVivier and Tara Righetti, Changing Paradigms for a Low Carbon World, 46 Harv. Env. L. Rev. Online 59 (2022). 

Tara Righetti and Joe Schremmer, Waste and the Governance of Common Property, 93 Colo. L. Rev. 609 (2022). 

Tara Righetti, Temple Stoellinger, & Robert Godby, Adapting to Coal Plant Closures: A Framework to Understand State Energy Transition Resistance, 51 Envtl. L. 957 (2022).

Tara Righetti, Kris Koski, Jesse Richardson, & Sam Taylor, The Carbon Storage Future of Public Lands, 38 Pace Envtl. L. Rev. 181 (2021) (reprinted in Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Journal vol. 58, No. 2 (2021) (included on list of top 20 articles in the 15^th edition of the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review). 

Tara Righetti, The Incidental Environmental Agency, 3 Utah L. Rev. 685 (2020). 

Tara Righetti, Liberating Split Estates, ­­14 Int’l J. of the Commons 638 (2020). 

Tara Righetti, Hannah Wiseman, and James Coleman, The New Oil and Gas Governance, 130 Yale L. J. Forum 51 (2020). 

Tara Righetti, Contracting for Sustainable Surface Management, 71 U. of Ark. L. Rev. 367 (2018).