Prof. Klass Receives Distinguished Service Award from MSBA

The Minnesota State Bar Association has announced that Alexandra Klass, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Law School, has been awarded the 2017 Eldon G. Kaul Distinguished Service Award from the MSBA’s Environmental, Natural Resource, and Energy Law Section. The award recognizes a member of the bench or bar who has demonstrated a significant commitment and made an outstanding contribution to environmental, natural resources or energy law in the state of Minnesota.

For nearly 25 years, Klass has focused her practice and scholarship on these areas of the law. She was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis from 1993 to 2004, handling federal and state trial and appellate court cases that touched on issues of contaminated property, wetlands, environmental review, mining, environmental rights, zoning, eminent domain, and environmental torts. She served on the board of directors for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (2011-16), where she remains a legal committee member. She was a member of the MSBA Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law Section Governing Council (2005-13), and she served as co-chair of the Environmental Law Section of the Hennepin County Bar Association (2000-06). She is currently a fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

Klass has co-authored three textbooks on energy law and environmental law and published widely on those topics and others in many leading U.S. law journals. In 2015 she was recognized as a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, an honor reserved for the University’s “highest-achieving mid-career faculty who have recently attained full professor status … and whose accomplishments have brought great renown and prestige to Minnesota.” She has been named teacher of the year at the Law School (2009-10), served as associate dean for academic affairs (2010-12), and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2015).

In remarks given at the Kaul Award ceremony on April 20, Klass said, “I am incredibly honored and humbled to receive this award. I’m truly grateful to be teaching in the same legal community in which I was a practicing attorney for 10 years. This has allowed me to remain a part of this wonderful group of environmental and energy law lawyers in Minnesota even while being a full-time academic. I continue to learn from all of you, rely on you as guest speakers in my classes, benefit from your comments on my scholarly work, and love watching so many of my students become part of this community.”

Alexandra Klass