Erin Ryan joined the law faculty at the University of Southern California in 2026, following long service at Florida State as the Atkinson Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Environmental Programs, where she oversaw the FSU Center for Environmental, Energy, and Land Use Law. She specializes in environmental and natural resources law, water law, property and land use, federalism, and negotiation, and was recognized in 2022 with a university-wide teaching award for Innovation in Teaching.

Ryan has presented widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, the National Association of Attorneys General, the U.S. Forest Service, and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. She has advised National Sea Grant multilevel governance studies involving Chesapeake Bay and consulted with multiple institutions on developing sustainability programs. She has appeared in the Associated Press, Foreign Policy, London Financial Times, Thomson-Reuters Beijing, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, NPR, and local NBC and CBS Television News. She is the author of over fifty scholarly works and twenty-five others, including Federalism and the Tug of War Within (Oxford, 2012) and Law for the Land (Cambridge, 2026). She has guest-lectured at leading universities and government agencies in China, India, Japan, Vietnam, Israel, England, Northern Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, and Australia.

Ryan is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Hewlett Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. She clerked for Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before practicing environmental, land use, and local government law in San Francisco. In 2011-12, Ryan served as a Fulbright Scholar in China, where she taught American law, studied Chinese governance, and lectured throughout the country – returning to teach and guest lecture in 2016 and 2025. In 2019, she was selected as a Research Fellow by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. In 2025, she joined the Scientific Advisory Board for the Eurac Institute for Comparative Federalism in Bolzano.

Prior to law school, Ryan served as a U.S. Forest Service ranger on the Mono Lake District of the Inyo National Forest, east of Yosemite National Park. She graduated from Harvard College with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and received a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University.