Megan Wachspress

Wachspress is an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. Her teaching and scholarship incorporate her academic research as an intellectual historian and years of practice experience as an environmental attorney litigating grid decarbonization on behalf of the Sierra Club. Wachspress's current research and writing focuses on conceptions of the public in the context of utility regulation and climate change and the intersection between economic justice and decarbonization. She teaches or will teach Property, Environmental Law, and Energy Law. 

Prior to joining the USF faculty Wachspress was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School, where she taught legal research and writing. Before that she spent a decade in practice, as a Staff Attorney with the Sierra Club, an associate with Altshuler Berzon (a union- and employee-side labor and employment firm), and a judicial clerk for Judge William Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court. Wachspress graduated from Yale Law School and holds a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Wachspress is currently working on two projects: a history of electric utilities' duty to serve and its continuing force in an era of data center hyperscalers, and a history of the crime of public nuisance and its relevance to ongoing climate litigation. She also writes on legal topics for a popular audience, including on the National Environmental Policy Act, prisons and immigration detention, and the ongoing battle against a coal terminal in Oakland, California, and serves as a volunteer mathematics instructor at Mount Tamalpais College in San Quentin. 

• Environmental law 
• Energy law and public utility regulation
• Early modern English political and legal theory

• University of California, Berkeley, PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, 2018
• Yale Law School, JD (2015)
• University of Cambridge, MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, University of Cambridge (2007)
• University of Chicago, BS in Mathematics and Political Science (2006)