About

Ann Eisenberg is one of the nation’s leading experts on law in rural communities. Her work focuses on the extractive rural economy, energy law, and community economic development. Professor Eisenberg’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous law journals, including the University of Colorado Law Review, the U.C. Davis Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Washington University Law Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been downloaded over 4,300 times on SSRN and cited more than 200 times according to HeinOnline.

Professor Eisenberg is regularly invited to comment on issues such as rural livelihoods and depopulation, the transition to clean energy, and the challenges of small-town local governments. She is currently the Patrick D. Deem Professor of Law at West Virginia University College of Law and Research Director for WVU Law’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development.

Professor Eisenberg’s book, Reviving Rural America: Toward Policies for Resilience, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2024 and received WVU College of Law’s 2025 Award for Significant Faculty Scholarship. Drawing on archival research conducted while Eisenberg was a fellow with the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the book applies the lens of law and political economy to rural marginalization and argues that man-made rural decline should be counteracted through climate-friendly policies that reconceptualize rural America as a commons.