A. Dan Tarlock ;is currently Distinguished Professor of Law at the Chicago- Kent College of Law in Chicago, Illinois. He was born in northern California in 1940 and holds an A.B. (1962) and LL.B. (1965) from Stanford University. Previously, Professor Tarlock was a member of the faculty of Indiana University, Bloomington from 1968- 1982, and has visited at the universities of Brigham Young, Chicago, Kansas, Michigan, Texas, and Utah. In 1996, he was a Distinguished Foreign Visitor in Residence at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

Professor Tarlock has practiced law in San Francisco and Omaha-Denver, and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has lectured and written extensively and consulted widely in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia in the fields of water and land use law and environmental management. He is a co-author of a basic water law casebook Water Resource Management (with James Corbridge and David Getches)(4th ed. 1993), as well as a water law treatise, Law of Water Rights and Resources (1988 with annual updates).

From 1987-1994, Professor Tarlock was a member of the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences\National Research Council. From 1990-1997, he was a special counsel to the California Resources Agency to assist in the preparation of innovative landscape-scale multi-species and habitat biodiversity protection programs. In 1997 he served as the principal drafter to the Western Water Policy Advisory Review Commission. The Commission report, Water in the West, was published in 1998. He is currently a consultant to the United States Section of the International Joint Commission and a legal advisor to Commission for Environmental Cooperation established by the environmental agreement to NAFTA. He is married to Vivien C. Gross and has three children, Robert 20, Katherine 18 1/2, and Marc 17.