Arden Rowell

Assistant Professor
Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar

Professor Rowell’s teaching and research interests revolve around risk, time, and uncertainty, particularly in the fields of environmental law, administrative law, torts, and behavioral law and economics. Her article "Allocating Pollution," which argues that it is sometimes possible to use law to reduce the harm from pollution by reallocating it across the population, is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review. Another article, "Partial Valuation in Cost-Benefit Analysis," forthcoming in the Administrative Law Review, argues that regulators undervalue the benefits of regulations when they refuse to attach monetary values to highly emotional regulatory impacts like the death of children. Professor Rowell has also published two articles on the way the U.S. regulatory system deals with risk through time: "On Discounting Regulatory Benefits: Risk, Money, and Intergenerational Equity" (with Cass Sunstein) in the University of Chicago Law Review and "The Cost of Time" in the Notre Dame Law Review.

Before joining the Illinois faculty, Professor Rowell was a Bigelow Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School, from which she also received her J.D. After law school, Professor Rowell practiced at Perkins Coie LLP in Seattle, where she focused her practice on catastrophic torts. Professor Rowell has a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology/archaeology, which she earned from the University of Washington at the age of 18. Before law school, she worked as an encyclopedia entry writer and as a video game tester.