Richard Lazarus

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.

The Trump administration now says that it wants to repeal the Obama administration’s prized environmental policy: the Clean Power Plan, which mandates 32% cuts in CO2 emissions by 2030...“If (critics of the law) were right, government could never regulate newly discovered air or water pollution, or other new harms, from existing industrial facilities, no matter how dangerous to public health and welfare, as long as the impacts are incremental and cumulative,” write Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus of Harvard Law School.

The rapid-fire push by the Trump administration to wipe out significant chunks of the Obama environmental legacy is running into a not-so-minor complication: Judges keep ruling that the Trump team is violating federal law...Policy experts say the reversals also underscore the fact that crucial positions within the E.P.A. and the Interior Department remain unfilled, and that a lack of trust exists between political appointees and career staff members. “The career people at E.P.A. and D.O.J. are top-notch lawyers,” said Richard J. Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University. “But you have political people come in, and they don’t trust them at all and try to do it without them.”

Despite rainy weather, crowds of Harvard Law School students, staff, faculty, alumni, and their families gathered in Jarvis Field Friday night for an event recognizing the school’s contributions to the arts as part of its bicentennial celebrations. The event, called “HLS in the Arts,” spanned two days and is one of the first in year-long series to celebrate the Law School’s 200th birthday...Richard J. Lazarus, a Law School professor and the faculty chair of the bicentennial planning committee, said that this year’s celebrations have been in the works since as early as 2014, when he began meeting with faculty, staff, and students to brainstorm ideas for how best to commemorate this milestone in the school’s history. His said his intention was for the school to spend the year recalling its own achievements, but instead actively showing what makes it so “iconic.”

Since its establishment in 1817, Harvard Law has educated presidents, senators, CEOs, and six of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices. So, how to celebrate a 200th birthday? Harvard Law is doing it with not one but three events over the course of the school year. Each event is intended to “show what an interesting place [Harvard] is by doing interesting things, rather than talking about how interesting we are,” explained Professor Richard Lazarus, the faculty chair of the bicentennial’s planning committee...“It’s not what you think Harvard Law School would do,” remarked Lazarus. He noted that the event “underscores the reach of the law school in different ways that are surprising, and also fun.”