Richard Lazarus

...“It’s a neutral principle, although the effect isn’t always neutral,” Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, said. “Congress stopped making clean air laws after 1990, so the E.P.A. has to work with increasingly tenuous statutory language. In effect, his approach to environmental law would make it harder to address current problems so long as Congress remains out of the lawmaking business.”

An op-ed by Richard Lazarus. Justice Anthony Kennedy's announced retirement earlier today sent shock waves across the nation's capital and the nation itself. Justice Kennedy's impact on the Supreme Court during the past 30 years has been enormous. He has been at the center of the Court, often supplying the controlling vote in closely divided, high-profile cases. But he has not been a judicial minimalist. Whichever way he swings, Justice Kennedy swings for the fences.

...Ever since Rapanos, conservatives and liberals have debated whether Scalia or Kennedy had the controlling opinion. That's an important question when WOTUS-related challenges are heard in circuit and district courts, which have to follow the Supreme Court's precedent. While no lower court has found Scalia's opinion to be the only controlling opinion in the case (some have said only Kennedy is, and some have said a combination of both is OK), none of that matters before the Supreme Court. "They are not going to feel bound one way or another by what was said in Rapanos because there was no majority opinion," said Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School who has argued Supreme Court cases in front of Kennedy.

Though he sided with conservatives on most issues, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy sometimes broke ranks when it came to the environment. Kennedy, who announced Wednesday he will step down in July, was the key swing vote on one of the most important climate policies the United States has enacted: the regulation of greenhouse gases. The 2007 Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency decision forced the EPA to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. After a review of the science, the EPA issued an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases in 2009, which says carbon emissions are a threat to public health...But would a Supreme Court with another conservative justice on bench take a whack at Massachusetts v. EPA? It’s unlikely, according to Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School who has argued cases before the Supreme Court. “I think on that question, the odds are very, very small,” he told me.

The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, announced Wednesday in a letter hand-delivered to President Trump, could bring about sweeping changes to U.S. environmental law, endangering the federal government’s authority to fight climate change and care for the natural world. With Kennedy gone, a more conservative Supreme Court could overhaul key aspects of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, legal scholars say. And any new justice selected by President Trump would likely seek to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency, curtail its ability to fight global warming, and weaken its protections over wetlands...The reason has to do with simple math. As on many other issues, Kennedy has functioned as the court’s swing vote on the environment, occasionally joining with the court’s four more liberal justices to preserve some aspect of green law. “He’s been on the court just over 30 years, and he’s been in the majority in every single environmental case but one. You don’t win without Kennedy,” said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard who has argued 14 cases in front of the Supreme Court.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new regulation Tuesday that would restrict the kinds of scientific studies the agency can use when it develops policies, a move critics say will permanently weaken the agency’s ability to protect public health...Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, said Mr. Pruitt would be “walking into a judicial minefield” if he told the E.P.A. to no longer consider certain studies during agency rule-making. That, Mr. Lazarus said, would be considered an arbitrary and capricious decision under the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs agency rule-making, and would “subject any agency regulation issued based on such a defective record to ready judicial invalidation.”

If EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt survives the onslaught of accusations of mismanagement and excessive spending with his job still safe, he has his biggest benefactors to thank...So, why is Pruitt still so valuable to Trump donors like Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma oilman who chaired Pruitt’s attorney general reelection campaign and called Trump last week? The answer doesn’t appear to be that Pruitt is a legal genius who has rapidly and effectively gutted regulations in a way that satisfies the courts. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, told the New York Times...Former EPA attorney Joseph Goffman, Harvard Environmental Law’s executive director, has been tracking the dozens of air, water, and climate regulations Pruitt has taken aim at so far. And Goffman has a counterargument: Pruitt has undermined environmental protection in ways that are not so easy or straightforward to untangle with a lawsuit. “He certainly sent the signal that in any given instance his policy preference is achieving lower levels of pollution reduction and achieving pollution reduction on a slower schedule,” Goffman says.

As ethical questions threaten the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, President Trump has defended him with a persuasive conservative argument: Mr. Pruitt is doing a great job at what he was hired to do, roll back regulations...The result, they say, is that the rollbacks, intended to fulfill one of the president’s central campaign pledges, may ultimately be undercut or reversed. “In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. And they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”

A former solicitor for the U.S. Interior Department sought to set the record straight on public lands Wednesday, disputing Western activists’ views that U.S. government ownership amounts to an unfair land grab and reminding listeners that much of the land was the federal government’s from the beginning...The event, in Harvard’s Northwest Laboratory, was sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and introduced by its director, Daniel Schrag, the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering. It featured a discussion by environmental law expert Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, and Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School...Lazarus also discussed the lawsuits by environmental activists that Trump’s actions have prompted. Each side has good arguments, he said, but none that are clear winners.

Justice Elena Kagan committed a breach of protocol midway through the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dec. 5 argument in a case involving a cake for a gay wedding. Seeing that a lawyer’s time was expiring but wanting to ask another question, Kagan said she was confident Chief Justice John Roberts would give the attorney a bit more time. Kagan then looked sheepishly toward Roberts. "Is that OK?" she asked. Roberts gave her a look of mock exasperation, and the courtroom burst into laughter. The fleeting moment showed the rapport between the two and offered a glimpse into the dynamics of a court that often splits 5-4 along ideological lines...What the four share is a willingness to muffle some disagreements for what they see as a greater good. Each wants to avoid the perception that the court is "just another political institution," like Congress or the White House, said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor who focuses on the Supreme Court.

The mandate of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and enforce environmental regulations. Yet since he was confirmed last February, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has worked deliberately to stall or roll back this core work of his agency, efforts he’s now celebrating with posters...“He is much more organized, much more focused than the other Cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University, told the New York Times. “Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding.”

Harvard and Yale law schools cast a long shadow over clerk hiring by the Supreme Court justices—and it’s growing longer. Based on the National Law Journal’s analysis of clerk hires from 2005 to 2017, 50 percent of all Supreme Court law clerks in the past 13 years graduated from either Harvard or Yale, compared to 40 percent in a similar study 20 years ago...Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus insists there’s a reason for Harvard’s dominance: ”The students who get into this place are extraordinarily gifted. They are gifted academically. They are gifted in life experiences. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t students at other schools who are as good as the Harvard and Yale students. There are. But the concentration we have here is, I think, unparalleled.”

A year as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk is a priceless ticket to the upper echelons of the legal profession. Former clerks have their pick of top-tier job offers and can command $350,000 hiring bonuses at law firms...But amid the luster of being a law clerk, there’s an uncomfortable reality: It is an elite club still dominated by white men...And yet, most justices appear to be taking a passive approach to diversity rather than actively seeking minority clerks or pushing their networks to identify more diverse candidates. “I’ve never had that precise conversation with any justice,” said Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, a comment echoed by several other clerk-recommenders interviewed for this story...Another trend that helps explain the lack of diversity is what Harvard Law School professor Andrew Crespo called “ideological sorting” in the clerk hiring process. Crespo, who in 2007 was elected the first Latino editor of Harvard Law Review, clerked for Breyer and Kagan. “The more liberal justices tend to hire a greater number of liberal-leaning clerks than the conservative justices, and vice versa,” Crespo said. “If the small number of African-American and Latino applicants are also disproportionately liberal, then there may be fewer clerkship slots for which they are realistically competitive candidates.”

President Trump has dismissed global warming as a hoax, snubbed the Paris emissions pact and scrapped U.S. EPA climate rules. But executive actions can be fleeting — as the Trump administration has shown by moving swiftly to unravel many of President Obama's climate change policies. Yet there's a major piece of Trump's climate legacy that could be more enduring: his court picks...Richard Lazarus, an environmental law expert and professor at Harvard Law School, said courts have played an "outsized role" in climate policy in recent years because regulators are working with an old law to deal with a problem its authors weren't specifically addressing. "The reason why the courts play a big role right now is that, whether the executive branch is run by [President George W.] Bush or the executive branch is run by Obama, each time they're kind of stuck with old language," Lazarus said, noting that the 1970 Clean Air Act hasn't seen a major overhaul since 1990.

In almost every way, John F. Manning ’82 is the very image of a Harvard Law School dean. With two Harvard degrees, a Supreme Court clerkship, years of administrative experience at the school, and well-regarded scholarship to his name, Manning checks all of the expected boxes for the leader of one of the country’s preeminent legal institutions...“Being dean of Harvard Law School is a really hard job — there are a lot of demands on your time, a lot of constituencies that need to be satisfied — it’s like being president of a small college,” Law School professor Richard J. Lazarus said. “I think that people are very enthusiastic.”...“My job is to foster a large community in which there are lots of different perspectives, approaches, and methodologies,” Manning said. “What I do for my scholarship has nothing to do with what kind of things I’ll support as dean.”

Thousands of alumni, students, and faculty crowded Harvard Law School’s lecture halls and meeting rooms Friday for a full day of sessions with senators, judges, and renowned legal scholars to celebrate the school’s 200th birthday. The Law School, which was founded in 1817, has already hosted a series of events this year celebrating this milestone...Richard Lazarus, a Law School professor and the chair of the bicentennial programming, said the aim of the event was to celebrate the Law School with action, rather than reflection. “The basic aim and goal of the October summit is basically to celebrate the Law School, but not to celebrate the Law School by reflecting on how wonderful Harvard Law School is, but by kind of being wonderful,” Lazarus said...Rebecca A. Vastola [`20], a first-year law student who attended the Senators’ event, said that the focus on government and public interest speakers was especially appealing to her. “I think it’s an incredible opportunity, for those of us that this is corresponding with our first year at Harvard,” Vastola said.