Lesley McAllister, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, died late last month after a four-year battle with lung cancer. She was 47 years old.
Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the law school at the university, said that “Professor McAllister was a brilliant teacher and scholar, and a courageous person who used her skills and training for the public good, fighting to protect the environment and for the rights of the terminally ill.”
Professor McAllister was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio. She was a 1991 graduate of Princeton University in New Jersey, where she majored in civil engineering. After serving in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, she returned to the United States to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and a juris doctorate at Stanford Law School.
Professor McAllister served on the faculty at the University of San Diego School of Law from 2005 to 2013, before joining the law school faculty at the University of California, Davis. She was the co-author of Climate Change Law and Policy (Aspen Publishers, 2012) and the author of Making Law Matter: Environmental Protection and Legal Institutions in Brazil (Stanford Law Books, 2008).