Professor Janet E. Milne

Janet E. Milne is Professor of Law of Vermont Law School and director of the law school’s Environmental Tax Policy Institute. She is recognized internationally as an expert in environmental tax policies. The courses she has taught at Vermont Law School include Environmental Taxation, Climate Change: The Power of Taxes, Land Use Law, Land and Takings, Property, and Income Tax.After receiving her BA degree, magna cum laude, from Williams College in 1973, Professor Milne served as field director, then associate director, for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, a land conservation organization. She received her JD degree in 1981, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as lead case and notes editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. After clerking for the Honorable Frank M. Coffin, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Portland, Maine, she served as an attorney for The Washington Post. She subsequently was a tax attorney with the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling. She then became the legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, handling tax, trade, and health care issues falling within the senator’s jurisdiction as chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Returning to New England, Professor Milne served as special counsel to Dartmouth Medical School from 1994 to 1999 and as consultant to the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation from 1995 to 2001.

Professor Milne first joined the faculty of Vermont Law School as an adjunct in 1994, when she taught a course on environmental taxation, and subsequently became a fulltime member of the faculty. She has pursued the field of environmental taxation in a variety of ways. In 1995, she researched Germany's environmental taxes as a fellow of the American Council on Germany. In 2000, she created the Environmental Tax Policy Institute at Vermont Law School, and in 2002 she organized and hosted the Third Global Conference on Environmental Taxation. She is a member of the steering committee for the conference series, now in its 19th year, and the Environmental Tax Policy Institute has co-sponsored many of the conferences. She has been a member of the American Bar Association Tax Section’s Environmental Taxes Committee (subsequently the Energy and Environmental Taxes Committee) and was the committee's vice chair for important developments until 2007. She was the lead editor of the Handbook of Research on Environmental Taxation (Edward Elgar 2012) and editor of Environmental Taxation and the Law (Edward Elgar 2017) and has written extensively about the role of taxation in achieving environmental protection.