Richard Lazarus

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.”

In the four months since he took office as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history, according to experts in environmental law...“Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “Pruitt has come in with a real mission. He is much more organized, much more focused than the other cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies. It’s very striking how much they’ve done.”

An appeals court Monday struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s 90-day suspension of new emission standards on oil and gas wells, a decision that could set back the Trump administration’s broad legal strategy for rolling back Obama-era rules...The agency has proposed extending the initial delay to two years; the court will hold a hearing on that suspension separately. “The court’s ruling is yet another reminder, now in the context of environmental protection, that the federal judiciary remains a significant obstacle to the president’s desire to order immediate change,” Richard Lazarus, an environmental-law professor at Harvard Law School, said in an email.

It was 25 years ago this week that the Supreme Court found a South Carolina beach-erosion regulation amounted to a taking of private property. Property rights advocates hailed the 6-2 decision as a milestone in the fight against regulatory overreach, saying it showed that government couldn't use rules to take land without paying for it. But some legal scholars who have studied the effects of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council say its impact hasn't been so sweeping. "It was of significance symbolically, but it didn't really prove when the rubber hit the road to lead to many takings findings, and actually might have ironically led to fewer," said Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School.

In a major property rights decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered a decisive victory to state and local governments and environmental groups. By a 5-to-3 vote, the justices made it much harder for property owners to get compensation from the government when zoning regulations restrict the use of just part of landowners' property...Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus called the decision a "clean, big win for both government regulators and environmental protection." "There is no nuance to the ruling," he said. It is a "soup to nuts" win for the government, and environmentalists.

The Supreme Court on Friday fortified environmental land-use regulations against legal challenges, frustrating property-rights activists who hoped their test case would open a host of development restrictions to constitutional attack...For Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor who represented St. Croix County, the ruling marked a long-awaited turnabout. In 1992, he was on the losing side of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, when the late Justice Antonin Scalia expanded the concept of regulatory takings to rein in environmental laws. Friday’s ruling was “a clean, big win for government regulators and environmental protection. There’s no nuance there,” Mr. Lazarus said.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had to decide in 2006 which wetlands and waterways make up the "waters of the U.S." protected by the Clean Water Act, he reached for his trusty Webster's New International Dictionary: Second Edition. What, he asked Webster's, is the meaning of the word "waters"? The dictionary, which the late conservative icon loved so much it appears in his official Supreme Court portrait, was the basis for Scalia's opinion in Rapanos v. United States, concluding that Clean Water Act protection extends only to relatively permanent surface waters and wetlands connected to larger water bodies...Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus agrees, saying arguing about Webster's dictionaries "is probably not a viable argument" as long as Kennedy remains on the bench. But dictionary definitions of "waters" could once again become significant if Kennedy leaves the court during the Trump administration, Lazarus said.

In his drive to dismantle President Barack Obama’s regulatory legacy, President Trump has signed executive orders with great fanfare and breathed life into a once-obscure law to nullify numerous Obama-era regulations. But his administration is also using a third tactic: Going to court to stop federal judges from ruling on a broad array of regulations that are being challenged by Trump’s own conservative allies....“If the courts uphold the previous administration, you still have the discretion to change things, but you’ve lost the argument that you were forced to do it or that the previous administration exceeded legal bounds,” said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard University.

When President Trump chose the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, his mission was clear: Carry out Mr. Trump’s campaign vows to radically reduce the size and scope of the agency and take apart President Barack Obama’s ambitious climate change policies...Legal experts say they can see why opponents of climate change policy want to go after the endangerment finding — as long as it remains in place, any efforts to undo climate regulations can always be reversed. “As a matter of theory, they’re absolutely right,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “If you want to get rid of the climate stuff, you get rid of the root, not just the branches. They want him to uproot the whole thing.”

Richard Lazarus is known as the "dean of environmental law," but he'd rather be called the "solicitor general for environmental law." To his close friends, he's Richy. The Harvard Law School professor is well known in environmental and legal circles. He's argued before the Supreme Court 14 times and participated in 42 cases before the high court. He's also the former roommate of Chief Justice John Roberts. Lazarus has taught at top law schools, worked in the Justice Department's environmental division and was executive director to the commission investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. He recently spoke to E&E News about his longtime friendship with Roberts, sizing up Supreme Court justices and his stint selling ice cream in Urbana, Ill.

There are 205 accredited law schools in the US. If Neil Gorsuch is confirmed for the Supreme Court, two-thirds of the current justices will have studied at just one of them: Harvard...“It does mean something and it does matter,” says Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The Supreme Court didn’t use to be this way...Earlier courts were quite geographically diverse and educationally diverse.”...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law specialist at Harvard, says the court would benefit from greater diversity. The homogeneity of education and professional experience among the nine justices “skews the perspectives they bring” to the 70 or so cases decided each year. Along with complex legalities, those disputes turn on “questions of perspective and empathy, understanding of how the world works and what makes human, rather than just legalistic, sense”, he says...Richard Lazarus, a Harvard professor who has argued 13 Supreme Court cases, says the Trump presidency, already entangled in a series of legal challenges, could reverse the decline as idealistic young people conclude anew that “law matters”.