Professor Becky L. Jacobs, Waller Lansden Distinguished Professor of Law, brought more than a decade of national and international experience when she joined the College of Law faculty in 2002. She came to UT from Duke Energy International’s Sao Paulo, Brazil office, where she worked as an Assistant General Counsel. Early in her career, she clerked for the Honorable Pasco M. Bowman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. She then practiced with the law firms of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher and Shook, Hardy & Bacon, spending time in the London offices of both firms, and she also worked as an in-house lawyer for CNG Transmission and Conoco. She was the top graduate in her law class at the University of Georgia where she was named to the Order of the Coif and was the Symposium Editor of the Georgia Law Review.

Professor Jacobs teaches and writes in a number of interconnected areas, including environmental and natural resources law, the built environment, and infrastructure; conflict resolution; global public health law; international business and trade law; gender and the law; and development issues. She often approaches these topics from an anthropo-legal/socio-legal perspective, exploring the motivations and conditions that animate societal responses to, and society’s influence on, the development of the law and adopting the intersectionality necessary to interrogate human/ecological interactions and interdependencies. Her articles have appeared in, among journals, the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, the Emory International Law Review, the Berkeley Journal of Gender Law & Justice, and the Virginia Environmental Law Journal. She also contributed an essay to the award-winning book, DISCUSSIONS IN DISPUTE RESOLUTION: THE FORMATIVE ARTICLES, published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Jacobs has twice received the Bass, Berry & Sims Faculty Award, and she also has been honored with a Moot Court Board Special Service Award, the Tom & Elizabeth Fox Faculty Award for Service to The Bench & Bar, and the University of Tennessee Excellence in Academic Outreach Award. She is a Fellow at UT’s Center for the Study of Social Justice; an Expert at UT’s Center for Energy, Transportation, and Environmental Policy; and an Affiliated Faculty with UT’s Appalachian Justice Research Center; and she is a co-organizer of the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs’ and participates in the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts’ Just Environments Research Seminar.

• Education & Experience
• Publications

J.D., (summa cum laude), The University of Georgia School of Law

B.S., (summa cum laude), The Florida Institute of Technology

Curriculum Vitae

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

Full list of SSRN scholarly papers