Powers Resolution

Erica Levine Powers, the founder of Powers Resolution, is a dispute resolution professional and transactional and regulatory land use lawyer in Albany, New York, who in 2019 served as senior zoning and land use attorney in the City of Atlanta Law Department. She is admitted in Massachusetts, Maryland and New York. In 2020-2021 she chaired the American Bar Association Section of State & Local Government Law.

A cum laude graduate of Harvard in Modern European History and Literature, she holds J.D. and LL.M. (Taxation) degrees from Boston University School of Law. Initially counsel to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Banks, and then a corporate transactional lawyer at Gaston Snow & Ely Bartlett, Boston, she served as counsel to the Deputy Mayor/ Collector Treasurer of the City of Boston and as General Counsel to the Massachusetts Department of Food & Agriculture. She has practiced both public and private sector law in Maryland. She has been a visiting professor of planning (sabbatical coverage) at Cornell University, Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and Massey University in New Zealand. She joined the faculty of Albany Law School as an adjunct, teaching Alternative Dispute Resolution in Spring 2023.

Erica is an affiliated scholar in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University at Albany (State University of New York), where she served as an adjunct faculty member in land use and environmental planning from Spring 2009 through Spring 2013 and developed a graduate seminar on hydraulic fracturing. She is the lead editor and a contributing author of Beyond the Fracking Wars (ABA, 2013), acclaimed for its scope and objectivity. With MacArthur Fellow Thomas W. Mitchell, Powers co- edited Heirs’ Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform (ABA, 2022), an act currently adopted in twenty-three jurisdictions, on a topic where mediation plays an important role.

Erica is the Secretary of the New York State Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section, 2023-present, a co-chair of that Section’s Bylaws review task force, and co-chair of the Mediation Committee’s Mentorship Program; a recent past chair of the American Bar Association Section of State & Local Government Law (2020-2021) and a current co- chair of that Section’s Judicial and Alternative Dispute Resolution Committee; an Advisory Board member/ Council representative of the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section (2020-present); a former Commissioner of the Newburgh, New York Housing Authority (2007-2008); a past president of the Orange-Sullivan Women’s Bar Association (2005-2006); founder and chair, Friends of St. George’s Historic Cemetery, Newburgh, New York (2003-2005); and a member of the Concord, Massachusetts, Town Finance Committee (2000-2002), Affordable Housing Committee (1998-2000), and Natural Resources Commission (1984-87/ Vice-Chair 1987).