About

Donald Thomas Hornstein is the Thomas F. Taft Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where he has been a faculty member since 1989. He serves as the Director of the Center on Climate, Energy, Environment, and Economics (CE3) and is a faculty member of the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Project in the College of Arts and Sciences. His teaching and research interests include administrative law, insurance law, the law of regulation and regulatory compliance, environmental law, and appellate advocacy. Professor Hornstein's work has been published in prominent law reviews such as the Columbia Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, North Carolina Law Review, and Duke Law Journal. He has received multiple awards for his teaching excellence, including the 2019 Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching from the University of North Carolina, and has been recognized as one of the nation's best law teachers in a book published by Harvard University Press. Hornstein attended UCLA, graduating magna cum laude with Special Distinction in History, and served as the National College Debate Champion in 1971. He earned his J.D. from the University of Oregon School of Law, where he was Editor in Chief of the Oregon Law Review. His professional experience includes clerking for Judge Abner Mikva on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, practicing law at the U.S. Department of Justice, and working at the law firm Arnold & Porter. He has been appointed and reappointed for over ten years by the North Carolina Insurance Commissioner to the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association, a nonprofit insuring the state's coastal properties. Hornstein played a key role in designing the Wind Pool's climate resilience program, which is one of the largest insurer-led climate adaptation initiatives in the world. His teaching portfolio at the law school includes courses in Administrative Law, Environmental Law, and Insurance/Disaster Law.

Research topics

• Political science
• Business
• Law
• Economics
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Flooding the Zone: The State of Federal Flood Insurance at the Beginning of Trump 2.0

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2025-01-01

  articleSenior author

  The risks of flooding in the United States have never been more apparent, making all the more significant the state of flood insurance and the legal and political volatility of the National Flood Insurance Program. In this Article we discuss the details of “Risk Rating 2.0,” the most significant change to federal flood insurance in half a century, and its legal and political future in the new world of Trump 2.0. And, in addition to describing the details of this new change to federal flood insurance, we describe its advantages and disadvantages in both the newfound political environment in which it operates and its likelihood of continuing to survive its most significant legal challenge in federal court, in State of Louisiana v. Department of Homeland Security.

  Publisher

• Risk Regulation, Including the NC Wind Pool

  2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

• Lessons from U.S. Coastal Wind Pools About Climate Finance and Politics

  Boston College environmental affairs law review · 2016-06-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The financial costs of extreme weather are profound, not only in terms of the distress of those immediately affected but also in broader, more long-term macroeconomic and public budgetary effects. This Article focuses on the role that private and public insurance can play, both positively and negatively, on these effects. It also provides one of the most detailed analyses in the legal literature to date on the finances of three state residual-risk wind pools in the Gulf and Southeastern United States that have been created specifically with hurricane risks in mind.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Future directions of consumer flood insurance in the UK - reflections upon the creation of Flood Re

  ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2015-08-15 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Future directions of consumer flood insurance in the UKThe risk of flooding, which is increasing due to climate change, cannot be eliminated despite engineering controls to manage it.Controversial issues concerning the introduction of a scheme, Flood Re, to ensure that households at risk of flooding can continue to purchase affordable insurance against the risk have been discussed in numerous media reports, comments to public consultations and journal articles.No reports, comments or articles, however, even begin to compare in quality or depth to this selection of papers and the issues raised in them.The papers examine and analyse critical issues that have not previously been raised.They contain valuable insights into the issues which must be resolved in order for Flood Re to succeed.The papers should be studied by everyone involved in the residential property sector including insurers, mortgage lenders, and their advisors.The failure to resolve the issues raised in the papers will not only deter the proposed transition to market-priced consumer flood insurance; it may well result in great uncertainty and loss of faith in Flood Re when claims are made following the next period of extensive -and inevitable -flooding in the UK.

  OA PDF

• Insurance at the Energy-Water Nexus

  Faculty publications · 2014-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Balkanization of CAT Property Insurance: Financing and Fragmentation in Storm Risks

  Faculty publications · 2013-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

• Natural Disasters and the Financing of Fat Tails: Lessons from the Economics and Political Economy of Weather-Related Insurance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2013-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Environmental Law and Policy

  2013-09-16

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Resiliency, Adaptation, and the Upsides of Ex Post Lawmaking

  North Carolina law review · 2011-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Although the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of many states and foreign countries properly prohibit ex post facto lawmaking in the criminal context, the practice takes place quite regularly in other settings.This Essay argues that there are numerous reasons for this phenomenon, including the need for a resilient legal system to be able to respond to those who game the law through practices known as "regulatory arbitrage."

  Publisher

• The environmental role of agriculture in an era of carbon caps.

  PubMed · 2010-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The link between the production of food and the environmental regulation of farms, never a strong one, may finally begin to take shape as the world grapples with the new Carboniferous era, a manmade epoch of climate change and climate-change regulation.Such a development is long overdue.Almost half a century has passed since the initial publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,' the book that launched modem environmentalism.Yet the environmental law that emerged from this movement has always been, from the perspective of Rachel Carson's messages in Silent Spring, deeply disappointing.In a narrow sense, the disappointment relates to the environmental law that governs farms.Not only is the regulation of agricultural pesticidesthe central subject matter of Silent Spring -notoriously unsuccessful, 2 but environmental law as a general matter is so riddled with exemptions for agriculture that it has been described as the "anti-law" of farms. 3But modern environmental law also disappoints on a deeper level.Silent Spring's broader message was a respect for natural processes that Rachel Carson hoped would realign our economics,

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Wendy Wagner

  George Washington University

  5 shared

• Thomas O. McGarity

  2 shared

• Sidney A. Shapiro

  Wake Forest University

  2 shared

• Christopher Schroeder

  1 shared

• Carl F. Cranor

  University of California, Riverside

  1 shared

• Robert L. Glicksman

  1 shared

• Clifford Rechtschaffen

  1 shared

• Rena I. Steinzor

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Environmental Law

  University of California, Berkeley

  1991

• Other

  University of California, Berkeley School of Law

  1985

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1982

Awards & honors

• Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019)
• McCall Award for Teaching Excellence (eight times)
• Fulbright Award for research and teaching in East Africa