Patrick Shea

Patrick Shea is an American lawyer, author, legal scholar and past government official, known for his work on freedom of the press cases. He directed the Bureau of Land Management under President Clinton from 1997-1999. 

Other government positions Shea held during his varied career include serving on the Gore Commission on Aviation Safety and Security in 1996 and 1997, which investigated TWA Flight 800. Shea was also the assistant to the staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Operations (the “Church Committee”) in 1975 and 1976, and counsel to the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the drafting process of the Taiwan Relations Act. 

Shea was born in Salt Lake City and earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. He then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he studied human sciences and was part of the first graduating cohort of the degree. In 1975, he earned a juris doctor from Harvard Law School.

Today, Shea is a lawyer in private practice in Salt Lake City, with an emphasis on land management practices and emerging biotech companies. He is also a research professor of biology at the University of Utah where he has taught graduate seminars on water and undergraduate courses on the biology of  urban streams. As an affiliated scholar at the Bill Lane Center, Shea has taught courses on public lands and moderated panels  on rangeland fires, which pose a significant threat to both public lands and the American West in general. During the course of his long academic career, Shea has also taught at Brigham Young University, Kansas State University, Westminster College and Harvard University.