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Marcilynn Burke worked in the Obama administration
on public land issues before taking UO job by Bob Keefer
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October 12, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
W
hen she’s not busy being a lawyer and
administrator, Marcilynn Burke’s favorite
pastime is singing in a church choir. While
she’s also a fine soloist, Burke prefers to
hear her mellow alto blend in easily with
the voices of other singers around her.
“I am definitely the best choir member you’ll ever
meet,” she says.
That’s also the approach she has often used with her
legal work throughout a career that’s taken her from a
Southern hometown to working as a top administrator at the
federal Bureau of Land Management and serving as acting
assistant secretary for land and minerals management in
the Obama administration’s Interior Department.
Formerly on the faculty at the University of Texas Law
Center, Burke last summer took over as dean of the University
of Oregon School of Law — drawn here, she says, by the
school’s environmental and natural resources law program
along with its overall reputation as a law school.
Burke got her bachelor’s degree in international studies
at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1991
and her law degree at Yale University in 1995. There she
was editor of both the Yale Journal of International Law
and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.
Since then she has worked in environmental and land
use law during the era of the Sagebrush Rebellion, in
which states have tried to take over federal public lands in
the West; the original 2014 Bundy standoff in Bunkerville,