Rebecca Nelson is Federal Scholar in Residence 2020. Nelson, who is Senior Lecturer of the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, convinced the international jury of the eighth edition of the program with her excellent research manuscript “Regulating Cumulative Environmental Change in Multi-layered Legal Contexts”. Her research focuses on environmental and natural resources law and policy, with an emphasis on empirical research and practical solutions. She holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2018-2020), which aims to analyse and evaluate laws regulating cumulative environmental effects in the United States of America, European Union, Canada and Australia. From 2010-2014, Nelson led the Comparative Groundwater Law and Policy Program, a collaborative initiative between Water in the West at Stanford University and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. The Program focused on undertaking empirical research and convening stakeholder workshops to improve groundwater sustainability in the western US and Australia. In 2014, she was named the Law Council of Australia's Young Environmental Lawyer of the Year for her contribution to water law and environmental law. Nelson holds a Doctor of the Science of Law from Stanford University, where her dissertation focused on empirically assessing regulatory arrangements for protecting surface water and ecosystems from the impacts of pumping groundwater. She also holds a Masters in law (Stanford) and Bachelor of Engineering (Environmental) and Bachelor of Laws (University of Melbourne). Nelson formerly worked as a lawyer at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and in private practice in Australia. As Eurac Research’s 2020 Federal Scholar, she will spend a three-week research stay in Bolzano/Bozen to collaborate closely with our researchers at the Institute for Comparative Federalism and beyond.
