Ken Stahl

Kenneth Stahl is the Interim Dean of the Chapman University Fowler School of Law. He is a Professor of Law and the director of the Environmental, Land Use and Real Estate Law certificate program. Dean Stahl is a leading expert on land use, local government and housing law. He has served as President of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on State and Local Government and co-founded the annual State and Local Government Works-in-Progress Conference. He often advises and works with developers and housing advocacy organizations on matters related to the implementation of state housing law.     

Dean Stahl’s scholarly work focuses largely on housing law and policy, especially addressing the widespread “Not in My Backyard” syndrome. Recent works have dealt with state preemption of local land use regulation, the power of state and local government to invalidate private deed restrictions, and inconsistencies within and between state, local and federal housing policy. His articles have appeared in numerous top law journals, including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Iowa Law Review the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and Cardozo Law Review, among others. Dean Stahl has presented his scholarly work at numerous Universities around the globe.

Dean Stahl was selected as a participant at the prestigious Junior Faculty Forum at Harvard Law School in 2012. He has also been named Professor of the Year at Fowler School of Law and received the Michael Lang Award for Scholarly Excellence.

Before joining the Fowler School of Law, Dean Stahl spent four years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. Prior to that, he worked as a Trial Attorney for the United States Department of Justice, Office of Constitutional Torts, and as an Associate at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Arnold & Porter. Professor Stahl earned a B.A. with Highest Honors and Highest Distinction from the University of Michigan and a JD from Yale Law School. At Yale, he served as a Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an editor of the Yale Journal of Law and The Humanities.