March 07, 2025

Alison Gocke awarded 10th annual Morrison Prize for sustainability law article

Alison Gocke, associate professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law, has been awarded the 10th annual Morrison Prize for her Yale Law Journal article, Public Utility’s Potential.

 

The Morrison Prize is a $10,000 prize awarded to the most influential environmental sustainability-focused law journal article published in North America during the previous year. Sustainability-focused professors from four law schools independently judge all entries to identify the winner each year. The prize is hosted and managed by ASU’s Law and Sustainability program. 

 

“I am thrilled and honored to receive this award,” Gocke said. “The past winners of the Morrison Prize comprise some of the top scholars in the fields of energy and environmental law, and I am humbled to be grouped among them. As we confront our current energy transition, I think it is important that we look to past examples of how the law managed energy transitions and the legal tools that are available to address energy and environmental issues. My hope is that this piece starts a broader conversation about how historical approaches to energy regulation can help us in understanding the energy challenges of the modern day.”

 

Professor Gocke’s article argues that state public utility commissions have significant potential to lead the clean-energy transition and tackle climate change. She challenges the traditional divide between energy and environmental law, suggesting that environmental policy goals can be effectively pursued through energy regulation. Her article draws on New York City’s 1940s and 1950s transition from coal to natural gas, led by the city's Public Service Commission, to illustrate how public utility commissions can play a transformative role in environmental policy. She utlimately contends that modern commissions’ reluctance to engage in the clean-energy transition is driven by structural and political factors, not legal limitations.

 

Gocke holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a JD from Stanford Law School, and a Master of Science in environment and natural resources from the Stanford School of Earth Sciences. Her research focuses on energy law, environmental law and administrative law, emphasizing the intellectual framework behind environmental regulations.

 

Troy Rule, Professor of Law and Joseph Feller Memorial Chair in Law & Sustainability at ASU, serves as the Faculty Director of ASU’s Law & Sustainability Program and annually coordinates the Morrison Prize Contest. He notes that the Contest continues to set records for entries each year.

 

“The Morrison Prize Contest has solidified its reputation as the premier environmental law scholarship contest in the country.” Rule said. “Recent winning articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and now the Yale Law Journal. There are few more prestigious distinctions for an environmental law professor than that of Morrison Laureate. ASU Law is thrilled that Professor Gocke will now join this elite group of scholars.”

 

The Morrison Prize is named in honor of Richard N. Morrison, co-founder of ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

Past winners of the Morrison Prize

• In 2024, Karrigan Bork, professor of law at the University of California, David School of Law was awarded for his article “Water Right Extractions,” published in 2023 in the Harvard Environmental Law Review. 
• In 2023, the award went to "Grid Reliability Through Clean Energy," which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 2022 and was authored by professors Alexandra Klass, Joshua Macey, Shelley Welton and Hannah Wiseman.
• In 2022, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission general counsel Matthew Christiansen and University of Chicago Law Professor Joshua Macey won the Morrison Prize for their Harvard Law Review article, "Long Live the Federal Power Act's Bright Line."
• In 2021, University of Chicago Law Professor Joshua Macey won the Morrison Prize for his article "Zombie Energy Laws," describing how certain energy laws impacted the nation's decarbonization efforts.
• In 2020, Vanderbilt University Law School Professors Jim Rossie and Christopher Serkin won the Morrison Prize for their insightful article "Energy Extractions," which was published in the spring 2019 issue of the Cornell Law Review. The article described how local governments could better leverage their land-use regulatory authority to drive substantial increases in rooftop solar energy installations and energy-efficient real estate development.
• In 2019, a six-author team won the Morrison Prize for an unprecedented analysis of the structuring of conservation easements in the face of rapid climate change. The article, titled "Climate change challenges for land conservation: Rethinking conservation easements, strategies and tools," was co-written by Federico Cheever, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law; Jessica Owley, director of the environmental law program at University of Buffalo-State University of New York; Adena R. Rissman, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Forestry and Wildlife Ecology; M. Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature; Barton H. Thompson Jr., a professor of natural resources at Stanford Law School; and W. William Weeks, director of the Conservation Law Clinic at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law.
• In 2018, Minnesota Law School Professor Hari M. Osofsky and Jacqueline Peel, associate dean of the University of Melbourne Law School in Australia, won the prize for their academic article "Energy Partisanship." They outline the critical importance of circumventing fierce political divisions to combat climate change and guide doing so.
• In 2017, Vanderbilt University Professors Michael P. Vanderbergh and Jonathan Gilligan won the prize for "Beyond Gridlock." The article underscored the difficulties of effecting change through governments and highlighted the underutilized potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the private sector.
• In 2016, Dave Owen, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law and Colin Aspe, a freshwater conservation advisor at the Nature Conservancy, were the inaugural winners of the Morrison Prize. Their article, "Trading Dams," described creative new policy approaches for better balancing hydroelectric energy generation and environmental protection on the nation's river system.

Written by Crystal Jimenez