• Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
• Professor of Law
• Regents’ Medalist for Excellence in Teaching

Education

• AB, magna cum laude, Princeton University, 1982
• MPP, University of California, Berkeley, 1985
• JD, University of California, Berkeley, 1986

Biography

Professor Denise E. Antolini joined the Law School faculty in 1996 and serves as Director of the nationally recognized Environmental Law Program. She is Chair-Elect of the AALS’s Environmental Section, chair of the Law School Building Committee, a member of the Faculty Senate, and serves on the Honolulu City Council’s Clean Water and Natural Lands Commission. Her courses have included torts, environmental law, environmental litigation, domestic ocean and coastal law, and legal writing. She advises the Environmental Law Society and the Environmental Law Moot Court Team, which won the national championship in 1999 and top brief awards in 2002 and 2003. She received the 2006 University of Hawai`i Board of Regents' Excellence in Teaching Medal.

After a two-year federal district court clerkship in Washington, D.C., she spent eight years practicing public interest law with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now Earthjustice) in Seattle and Honolulu, serving as Managing Attorney of the Honolulu office from 1994 until 1996. She was editor-in-chief of Ecology Law Quarterly at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. She grew up in Santa Cruz, California.

Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Antolini litigated several major citizen suit environmental cases involving coastal pollution, water rights, endangered species, environmental impact statements, and Native Hawaiian rights. She served on the legal team that represented the plaintiffs in the PASH (traditional and customary Native Hawaiian rights) decision and was lead counsel on the legal team for the Windward parties in the early stages of the Waiāhole Water case (1993-1995).

After joining the faculty, she served as a member of the State Legislature's Tort Law Study Group (1997-1999) and the PASH Study Group (on Native Hawaiian traditional and customary rights, in 1998). In 2001, she served as Co-Chair of the "Managing Hawai`i's Public Trust Doctrine" Symposium at the University of Hawai`i focusing on the State Supreme Court's August 2000 Waiāhole Water decision. The proceedings of that Symposium and Professor Antolini's Foreword are published in the University of Hawai`i Law Review (Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 2001). In 2002-2003, she was the principal investigator of a year-long governance study on Hawai`i's Marine Protected Areas for the State of Hawai`i, Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR). She then worked under contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (National Ocean Service, Office of Coast Survey), to modernize the Coast Pilot 7 for mariners in Hawai`i with new information on environmental, navigational safety, and homeland security statutes and regulations. She is working on a grant from DLNR that focuses on the integration of indigenous rights and the management of nearshore marine resources. Additionally, she is part of an inter-disciplinary team at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa that was authorized by the State Legislature in 2008 to conduct a two-year study of the state’s environmental impact review system.

She is the author of “Modernizing Public Nuisance: Solving the Paradox of the Special Injury Rule” (2001) and “Punitive Damages in Reality and Rhetoric: An Integrated Empirical Analysis of Punitive Damages Judgments in Hawaii; 1985-2001” (2004). In 2007, she published a co-edited book (with Golden Gate Law Professor Cliff Rechtschaffen) with the Environmental Law Institute called Creative Common Law Remedies for Protecting the Environment. In 2009, she published an article on resolving the dual mandate problem of the National Park system (William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review), and has in press a book chapter on Hawai`i climate adaptation policy in Professor Bill Rodgers and Michael Robinson-Dorn’s new climate change reader (Carolina Press). She is working on a forthcoming book on Hawai`i environmental law, to be published by the University of Hawai`i Press.

Her other research projects include: a comparative analysis of environmental citizen group access to the courts in Italy; an examination of recent developments regarding national marine protected areas in Italy and Europe, focusing on Cinque Terre National Park; an article on proposed modifications to the Hawai`i environmental review process; and a paper on state marine protected areas. Professor Antolini is past chair of the Hawai`i State Bar Association's Natural Resources Section and was selected by Hawai`i Women Lawyers as the 2002 recipient of the Distinguished Community Service Award. For the 2003-04 academic year, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach international environmental law and conduct research as the Distinguished Chair in Environmental Studies in Turin, Italy (Politecnico di Torino, Faculty of Architecture, Urban, Territorial and Environmental Planning), allowing her family the wonderful opportunity to live in Italy for a year. She returned to Italy with her family in Spring 2007 to teach two environmental law and policy courses at an Italian school in Florence, as a Resident Director for the UH Mānoa Study Abroad program.

Professor Antolini was appointed in 2005 by Governor Lingle to serve as a member of the State Environmental Council, for which she served as Chair for one year. In 2004, she was appointed as the Vice Chair of Public Service of the Marine Resources Committee, part of the American Bar Association's Section on Environment Energy and Resources; in 2005, she joined the national Executive Committee of the Environmental Section of the American Association of Law Schools and in 2009 was appointed to the Chair-Elect position; from 2005 until 2008, she served on the ABA’s prestigious Standing Committee on Environmental Law. Professor Antolini lives on O'ahu's rural North Shore (Pūpūkea) with her husband and two sons, and enjoys hiking, gardening, and family beach excursions. She is a founding and current board member of the North Shore Community Land Trust, the Save Waimea Valley Coalition, and Hui Mālama o Pūpūkea-Waimea.

Selected Publications

BOOKS

• ENVIRONMENTAL LAW IN HAWAI‘I (University of Hawai`i Press 2010) (forthcoming).
• CREATIVE COMMON LAW STRATEGIES FOR PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT (Environmental Law Institute 2007) (Cliff Rechtschaffen & Denise Antolini, eds.).

CHAPTERS & ARTICLES

• Drowning Hawai`i: Island Resiliency and Climate Change, in Bill Rodgers & Michael Robinson-Dorn, CLIMATE CHANGE READER (Carolina Academic Press 2009) (forthcoming).
• National Park Law in the U.S.: Conservation, Conflict, and Centennial Values, 33 WM. & MARY ENVTL. L. & POL’Y REV. 851 (available at http://members.elpr.org/archives/33/Antolini.pdf).
• Attacking Bananas and Defending Environmental Common Law, 58 CASE W. RES. L. REV. 663 (2008).
• Common Law Remedies: A Refresher, in CREATIVE COMMON LAW STRATEGIES FOR PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT (Environmental Law Institute 2007), reprinted in ENVIRONMENTAL LAW INSTITUTE, NEWS & ANALYSIS, 38 ELR 10114 (Feb. 2008) (with Cliff Rechtschaffen).

Recent Awards, Appointments, Grants & Honors

• Chair (2008-2009) and Member, City and County of Honolulu Clean Water and Natural Lands Commission (2009-2011).
• Co-Principal Investigator, Grant, Hawaii State Legislature, Study of Hawai`i Environmental Impact Assessment Law (H.R.S. Chapters 341, 343, and 344), with Principal Investigator Karl Kim (Prof. Urban and Regional Planning) and Co-Principal Investigator Peter Rappa (UH Environmental Center) (2009-2010).
• Principal Investigator, Grant, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) (Fisheries Local Action Strategy Program), 2009-2010 DLNR Marine Law Fellowship.
• Principal Investigator, Grant, Harold K.L. Castle Foundation, 2008-2009 DLNR Marine Law Fellowship.
• Principal Investigator, Grant, Hawai`i Coral Reef Initiative, 2006-2007 Department of Land and Natural Resources(DNLR) Marine Law Fellowship, a partnership of the Environmental Law Program, the State of Hawai`i Attorney General, and DLNR.
• Principal Investigator, Grant, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and Department of Land and Natural Resources (Fisheries Local Action Strategy Program), MARINE GOVERNANCE AND INDIGENOUS RIGHTS STUDY, a comparative review of culturally based approaches to law and governance of marine resources (2007 - 2009).