Professor Mark Squillace joined the University of Colorado Law School faculty in 2005. He also served as the Director of the Natural Resources Law Center at Colorado from 2005-2013. Before joining the Colorado law faculty, Professor Squillace taught at the University of Toledo College of Law, where he was named the Charles Fornoff Professor of Law and Values, and at the University of Wyoming College of Law, where he served a three-year term as the Winston S. Howard Professor of Law. He is a former Fulbright scholar and the author or co-author of numerous articles and books on natural resources and environmental law, including most recently, Environmental Decisionmaking for the 21st Century (2016). In 2000, Professor Squillace took leave from law teaching to serve as Special Assistant to the Solicitor at the U.S. Department of the Interior. In that capacity he worked directly with the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, on a wide range of legal and policy issues, including the designation of national monuments under the Antiquities Act.
On December 4, 2017, President Trump announced his long-anticipated decisions to shrink two major national monuments in southern Utah. Trump shrunk the Bears Ears National Monument designated by President Obama at the end of 2016 from 1.35 million acres to 201,786 acres, a reduction of about 85%. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument was reduced…