Margot J. Pollans

Professor Margot Pollans joined Haub Law’s faculty in 2015. She is the Faculty Director of the Pace Food Law Center and served as the Shamik and Adrienne Trivedi Faculty Scholar from 2020-2022. She teaches several classes including Agriculture Law and the Environment, Food Systems and the Environment Law, and Environmental Law Survey.

During her time at Haub Law she has been a leader in building the national reputation of the Pace Food Law Center. She is also part of the Farm Bill Law Enterprise, a national partnership of law school programs working toward a farm bill that reflects the long-term needs of our society, including economic opportunity and stability, public health and nutrition, climate change mitigation and adaptation, public resources stewardship, and racial and socioeconomic justice.

Professor Pollans is an accomplished scholar whose primary research interests lie in the areas of food and agriculture law, administrative law and social justice. Her academic work has appeared in a variety of journals including in the California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and the Harvard Environmental Law Review. She is also the co-author of a casebook, Food Law: Cases & Materials. In 2022, she was named the recipient of Haub Law’s distinguished Goettel Prize for Faculty Scholarship for her article, "Eaters, Powerless by Design" published by Michigan Law Review (120 Mich. L. Rev. 643 (2022)).

Before joining Haub Law, Professor Pollans was the inaugural academic fellow at UCLA School of Law’s Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy. Previously, she was a Staff Attorney and Clinical Teaching Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, where she worked on a range of environmental litigation and supervised student clinicians. Following law school, Pollans clerked for the Honorable David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In 2017 she was named “40 Under 40 Rising Stars in Food Policy” by the NYC Food Policy Center.

• BA, Columbia University
• JD, New York University School of Law
• LLM, Georgetown University Law Center

• Administrative Law
• Environmental Law Survey
• Agriculture Law and the Environment
• Food Systems and the Environment Law
• Property

View all of Professor Pollans’s publications on SSRN, Digital Commons or download her CV (PDF).

• “Bodies as Food System Sacrifice Zones,” in Research Handbook on International Food Law (Michael Roberts ed. Forthcoming 2023)
• Eaters, Powerless by Design, 120 Mich. L. Rev. 643 (2022)
• FDA as Food System Steward, 46 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 1 (2022) (with Matthew Watson)
• The Right Family, 39 Colum. J. Gender & L. 1 (2020) (with Noa Ben-Asher)
• The New Food Safety, 107 Calif. L. Rev. 1173 (2019) (with Emily Broad Leib)
• “Eco-labeling,” in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Law (Emma Lees & Jorge E. Viñuales eds., 2019) (with Jason Czarnezki & Sarah Main)
• “Food Systems,” in Climate Change, Public Health, and the Law (Michael Berger & Justin Gundlach, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Drinking Water Protection and Agricultural Exceptionalism, 77 Ohio St. L.J. 1195 (2016).
• Regulating Farming: Balancing Food Safety and Environmental Protection in a Cooperative Governance Regime, 50 Wake Forest L. Rev. 399 (2015)
• A “Blunt Withdrawal”? Bars on Citizen Suits for Toxic Site Cleanup, 37 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 441 (2013)

• UCLA School of Law Teaching Fellow, Resnick Program for Food Law & Policy, 2013 – 2015
• Georgetown University Law Center Teaching Fellow & Staff Attorney, Institute for Public Representation, 2011 – 2013
• Clerkship, Hon. David S. Tatel, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, 2010 – 2011

• 2022 Goettel Prize for Faculty Scholarship award recipient
• NYC Food Policy Center, “40 Under 40 Rising Stars in Food Policy” 2017

Food and Beverage Law, Food Systems Law, Environmental Law, Administrative Law, Agriculture Law