Environmental Law and Policy

Helping key players across Massachusetts — including the City of Boston and environmental nonprofits — reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 is a focus for the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Each year, half of HLS’ first-year J.D. students and around a quarter of LL.M. students participate in at least one of HLS' 11 Student Practice Organizations, with some involved in multiple organizations at once.

This academic year, 14 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellows have been named at Harvard Law School.

Hannah Perls ’20 and Hana Veselka Vizcarra of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program assess the new administration’s efforts to address climate change.

In recognition of Earth Day, we highlight some recent work and perspectives of Harvard Law's students and scholars committed to environmental change.

Students in the Harvard Law School Environmental & Energy Law Program switch from tracking environmental rollbacks to analyzing how to the Biden-Harris administration can implement its ambitious climate plan.

At a recent event, Harvard Law School Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus gave an account of the environmental policy swing underway in the Biden administration.

The effect of COVID-19 on the law has been transformative and wide-ranging, but as a Harvard Law School panel pointed out on the one-year anniversary of campus shutdown, the changes haven’t all been for the worse.

Harvard Law alum Daniel Aaron ’20 thinks high obesity rates among people of color may be another legacy of ongoing racism in America.

Three Harvard Law School professors have teamed up with MIT Press to launch a new journal focused on issues of inequality.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January, dozens of Harvard Law community members, including faculty and alumni, have been tapped to serve in high-profile positions in his administration

Group led by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Program petitions the president to immediately rescind key policies that restrict the government’s consideration of harms from greenhouse gas emissions on protected animals.

Wendy Jacobs, one of the nation’s most highly celebrated environmental law experts, was the founding director of the first-ever environmental law and policy clinic at Harvard Law School.

Should smoking be among the pre-existing health risks that qualify people for priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine? Harvard Law public health expert Carmel Shachar says the answer is yes. 

In their new report, An Evaluation of the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition highlight opportunities to make the program more equitable and effective amid the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

As the only team members on their International Human Rights Clinic project, Laura Soundy ’22 and Rehab Abdelwahab ’21 have learned how critical it is to talk about subjects other than law. In doing so, they learned they were both quarantining in Texas, and have formed a plan to safely meet in person next year.

Alumni books that shed light on what formed a president, a vice-presidential candidate, and a barrier-breaking empire builder, among other topics.

The Harvard Gazette recently asked Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law Robert Anderson, and other members of the Harvard community, “Is this the end of Columbus Day, and how can America best replace it?” 

A new report from the HLS International Human Rights Clinic and the Conflict and Environment Observatory establishes a new framework for addressing human harm resulting from the environmental consequences of conflict.

“Racial Equality?,” a new year-long lecture series organized by Professors Randall Kennedy and Annette Gordon-Reed ’84, aims to address some of these acute issues with a wider lens that investigates both the paths to—and potential manifestations of—racial equality.

Katherine Meyer, director of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic, corresponded with Harvard Law Today about the clinic's recent Supreme Court amicus brief filing in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the Sierra Club, concerning access to information regarding the adverse impacts of federal actions on endangered and threatened species.