professor Daniel Walters Joins texas A&M School of Law Exploring Adminstrative Law

Daniel Walters-3Professor Daniel Walters grew up in the Chicago area. As an undergraduate pursuing a degree in political science, he first became inspired to study Law through a Constitutional Law class. He was impressed by the “special kind of politics” he found in those cases—an elevated discourse where participants took each other’s views seriously and exhibited mutual respect (in the best of times). “Supreme Court justices . . . didn’t just assert their positions and ignore countervailing evidence, like ordinary political actors often do. Instead, they usually worked hard to defend their positions and took each other’s views seriously. Seeing that left a mark on me.” 

Since then, Professor Walters has spent his career going back and forth between political science and law. He earned his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 2012, then spent three years as Regulation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Program on Regulation. He clerked for the honorable M. Margaret McKeown on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Most recently, he served as Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Assistant Professor at Penn State University, and an Affiliate Researcher at the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment. 

While studying environmental policy in graduate school, Professor Walters discovered Administrative Law, the primary focus of his research since then. He views the subject as the key to understanding policy and what is really moving things behind the scenes. While the subject seems an obscure “insider’s game,” it is central to everything that happens in law and politics. In his research, he has critiqued modern attacks on judicial deference to agencies and written on the democratic legitimacy of the administrative state. He has taken an empirical, interdisciplinary approach to regulatory capture theory, agency discretion, and state-level implementation of the nondelegation doctrine. His research often spans environmental and energy law. He is particularly interested in climate change and the existing legal frameworks that might address it. As he recently put it, “[a]ddressing climate change requires major changes to existing legal frameworks governing the electric power grid, emissions control, and more, but it is often difficult to make these changes because the administrative state is increasingly hamstrung by the courts and because political actors lack the will or courage to take these temporarily painful steps. A lot of my more recent work seeks to identify legal levers for more meaningful climate action.” His works have been (or will be) published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, and Administrative Law Review, among others. 

Professor Walters was drawn to Texas A&M University School of Law because of the energy and natural resources department, where there is an “embarrassment of riches” in the faculty. He also saw a rare chance to spend time at a school that is rising in the rankings, seeing this as a formative moment in the school’s history. He enjoys golf and spending time with his wife and two dogs, Oliver (named after Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) and Wolfgang (named after Mozart).