Kate Johnstone

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Kate Johnstone is an associate in the Los Angeles office of Latham & Watkins and a member of the Environment, Land and Resources practice group within the firm’s Corporate Department. Kate received her JD from UCLA School of Law, where she specialized in Environmental Law, was elected to the Order of the Coif, and received faculty awards for Energy Law, Local Government Law, and Professional Responsibility. Kate’s practice focuses on environmental and energy regulatory transactional matters and land use matters, including advising on project siting and entitlement strategy and writ of mandate litigation. She has experience in matters involving the California Environmental Quality Act, various federal environmental laws, and various state and local planning, zoning, and historic preservation laws, among other environmental laws.

Prior to joining Latham, Kate served as a judicial extern to Judge Jean P. Rosenbluth in the Central District of California and worked as a law clerk for the Environmental Defense Fund. While in law school, she served as Chief of Production of the UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review and President of the UCLA Environmental Law Society. Between graduating from Occidental College and attending UCLA School of Law, Kate worked in the financial market research and environmental consulting fields.

Kate grew up between Rochester, New York and Hanover, New Hampshire, and has lived in Los Angeles since 2011.

Megan Mullin

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Megan Mullin is Professor of Public Policy and holds the Luskin Endowed Chair in Innovation and Sustainability at UCLA. She is Faculty Director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, which partners with civic leaders on research to advance equitable public policy addressing environmental challenges.

Mullin is a political scientist whose research examines how coordination problems, accountability failure, and inequality in environmental risks and benefits shape political response to environmental change. Recent projects focus on the governance and finance of urban water services, public opinion about climate change, and the local politics of climate adaptation. She also has published on federalism, election rules and voter turnout, and local and state institutional design.

Mullin’s work has appeared in Nature, Science, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and other journals in political science, public administration, and planning. She is the recipient of five awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for her book, Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water (MIT Press, 2009). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, and private foundations. She works regularly with policy makers, and her research and commentary have appeared in many national and international media outlets. In 2020, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Mullin received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. She served on the faculties at Temple University and Duke University prior to joining UCLA in 2023.