Richard Lazarus

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”.

Donald Trump launched an all-out assault on Barack Obama’s climate change legacy on Tuesday with a sweeping executive order that undermines America’s commitment to the Paris agreement. Watched by coalminers at a ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, the president signed an order to trigger a review of the clean power plan, Obama’s flagship policy to curb carbon emissions, and rescind a moratorium on the sale of coalmining leases on federal lands...“Whatever process was used create it, that process will have to be used to undo it,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law expert at Harvard University.

President Trump is set to make a trip to the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday to sign an executive order that will "initiate a review" of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan and unravel a handful of other energy orders and memorandums instituted by his predecessor...Exactly how the Clean Power Plan will affect the Paris Climate Agreement is "unknowable," Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University told ABC News. "As a formal matter, we cannot really withdraw from Paris for about two years," said Lazarus.

President Trump is poised in the coming days to announce his plans to dismantle the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy, while also gutting several smaller but significant policies aimed at curbing global warming. The moves are intended to send an unmistakable signal to the nation and the world that Mr. Trump intends to follow through on his campaign vows to rip apart every element of what the president has called Mr. Obama’s “stupid” policies to address climate change. The timing and exact form of the announcement remain unsettled, however....“Trump’s announcements have zero impact,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They don’t change existing law at all.”

Shortly after Thursday’s appeals court decision blocking his travel ban, President Trump vowed to fight on. “SEE YOU IN COURT,” he wrote on Twitter. But which court? Here is a look at Mr. Trump’s options...Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, said the justices should take a different approach in this case if the administration files an emergency application, recalling that the court heard arguments in very short order when the Nixon administration in 1971 unsuccessfully sought to block The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War. “The court should receive briefs from both sides, hear oral argument, deliberate among themselves in person and then decide,” Professor Lazarus said. “They can do so quickly, as they have done in the past, for example in the Pentagon Papers case.”

Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is drawing up plans to move forward on the president’s campaign promise to “get rid of” the agency he hopes to head. He has a blueprint to repeal climate change rules, cut staffing levels, close regional offices and permanently weaken the agency’s regulatory authority...Mr. Pruitt’s draft climate rule is designed to leave most coal-fired power plants open, but require them to install energy-efficient technology to slightly lower their emissions. “A rule like that might satisfy the letter of the law,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, “and would probably cut emissions less than a quarter of the Obama rule.”

Much of the response to President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch for the Supreme Court has centered on the 1991 Harvard Law School grad’s similarity to the justice he would replace, Antonin Scalia, who died last year. But the two diverge in at least one important respect, says Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law. “You won’t get any of the personalized attacks that Scalia was famous for,” said Fried. “He [Gorsuch] is not sarcastic and he is certainly not further to the right than Scalia was … his manner is much less aggressive and much more respectful of the people he disagrees with.”...Jane Nitze, J.D.’08, Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at HLS, clerked for Gorsuch from 2008 to 2009, getting to know both his judicial philosophy and his character. “What struck me was his real, genuine reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law that came through on a daily basis,” said Nitze...For Richard Lazarus, Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, Gorsuch was “the single most qualified person” on Trump’s list of 21 potential nominees, a judge “who is smart and has integrity.”

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has opposed giving broad deference to the EPA and other federal agencies during a decade on the federal bench, but his track record also indicates a reluctance to support “heavy-handed rollbacks” of Obama-era environmental rules, legal experts told Bloomberg BNA...And if confirmed, Gorsuch could also—if consistent in his reasonings—upend regulations promulgated by the Trump administration, Harvard Law School professor Richard J. Lazarus told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail. “The challenge … is to have judges who in fact apply the doctrine in an even-handed way even when it goes against the policies they might personally favor or be favored by those who have nominated them to the Court,” Lazarus said...The cases in which he has made decisions on environmental or public lands issues are really more about his administrative law views, Harvard Law School professor Jody Freeman told Bloomberg BNA. “He seems to come down on both sides depending on the particulars of the case.”

President Trump campaigned on sweeping promises to eliminate former President Barack Obama’s major environmental regulations and “get rid of” the Environmental Protection Agency. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump offered a down payment on those promises, with memorandums clearing the path to construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. He is expected to roll back a few more rules, including some on coal production, in the next few weeks...A year ago, Mr. Obama incited the coal industry’s rage with a stroke-of-the-pen executive action banning new leasing of coal mines on public lands. Mr. Trump has the same authority to undo the ban. “That was Obama hitting the pause button, and Trump can unpause it,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University. “Anything that was done without a lot of process up front can be undone without much process.”

President Barack Obama won a series of major cases before the Supreme Court on health care, gay rights, affirmative action and abortion, helping to preserve significant parts of his legacy. But, over hundreds of cases in eight years, his reception at the court, on the whole, was chilly...Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard who served in the solicitor general’s office and has studied the rise of the private Supreme Court bar, agreed. “The solicitor general’s office, and therefore the president, still has terrific lawyers but has lost its comparative advantage,” he said. “And its loss of comparative advantage in expertise during the past three decades has likely decreased at a rate that fairly approximates the decrease in its win rate.”

With today marking the first day of arguments for the Supreme Court, most would think that the justices’ work from the previous term is over. But in fact, the justices spend years reworking their opinions after they are initially released, purging them of grammatical, spelling, stylistic, and even factual errors. The court’s decisions take effect immediately, but the opinions—the written rationales behind the decisions— don’t become official until they are published in United States Reports, the official publication of Supreme Court rulings...The court’s “commitment to getting things absolutely right is commendable,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor. But the practice of quietly tinkering with opinions after the fact, and then being nontransparent about what changes were made, is “fairly indefensible,” said Lazarus, the first legal scholar to document the process.