Katherine Klem is a Litigation fellow with the Environment and Natural Resources practice group at Pacific Legal Foundation. Prior to joining PLF, she spent three years as a deputy county counsel for Tuolumne County, in rural California, observing close hand the difficulties for real people occasioned by onerous and unreasonable environmental regulations imposed by state and federal governments, as she represented and advised a broad range of County departments. She had been inspired to join the County to work with its Forest Health Program after watching fire after fire devastate her family’s beloved mountain country (elsewhere along the Sierra Nevada), not to mention other parts of California: In late college, she helped her family with its own response to the massive tree mortality events that hit the Central Sierra Nevada in the late 2010s (hundreds of dead pine trees all at once on the family property).
While she enjoyed her work on the County’s forest fuel reduction projects, Katherine is happy to be back at PLF, because suing the government is much more fun than being a part of it. She looks forward to expanding the scope of her work in environment and natural resources law as a fellow.
Katherine previously served as a summer law clerk and Constitution Law fellow at PLF. She graduated cum laude from Notre Dame Law School in 2021, having served as an articles editor on the Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in American politics from the University of Dallas in 2017. She loves spending time with her family, including her abundance of young nieces and nephews, exploring the Gold Country in California, and reading all the books on Old English history and language that she can find.