Environmental

On Earth Day, we highlight some of the work being done by Harvard Law students, scholars, clinics, and programs to address some our most pressing environmental issues.

As the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres was in charge of the 2015 climate talks in Paris. In a conscious departure from earlier conferences, she declared that any agreement should be unanimous, rather than merely a consensus.

Subsidies offered by the federal government for the purchase of new electric vehicles (EVs) may actually increase total greenhouse gas emissions without similar aid for secondhand buyers, concludes a new study led by Ashley Nunes, Ph.D., a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program.

Since 2018, Harvard Law students have been tracking environmental laws and regulations across administrations.

Harvard Law expert Shaun Goho explains how a complicated Supreme Court case could have major implications for government agencies and the environment.

Harvard Law Professor Christine Desan says the Biden administration is harnessing fiscal and monetary policy to bolster the economy, but should move faster to address climate change, crypto markets, public banking.

In this series, Harvard Law experts turn a critical eye to the Biden administration’s efforts on health care, the economy, criminal justice reform, and other areas important to Americans — and share their thoughts on its agenda for the future.

Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus says Biden has ‘quickly and effectively’ reversed many of former President Trump’s executive orders on the environment, but Congress ‘presents a major obstacle’ to the new administration.

Harvard Law Today recently spoke to Professors Terry Fisher and Ruth Okediji about COVID-19 vaccine challenges in the global south, waiving drug-maker patents, and what they propose to reform the system in time for the next pandemic.

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.

In his new book “The Rule of Five,” Richard Lazarus goes behind the scenes of the biggest environmental law case in Supreme Court history.

Beatrice Lindstrom, clinical instructor and supervising attorney in the International Human Rights Clinic, has been working for nearly a decade to secure accountability from the U.N. for a devastating cholera outbreak caused by UN peacekeepers in Haiti in 2010.

The Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic has released The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas, a first-of-its-kind interactive resource to inspire long-term policy solutions to food waste, hunger, and climate change.

“I’ve always had a passion for engaging in my curiosity,” says João Marinotti ‘20, a linguist turned lawyer whose work focuses on sustainability, business, property, and private law.

A physician-researcher, Machteld van Egmond LL.M. ’20 explored the intersections among empirical science, law, and medicine during her LL.M. year at Harvard Law School.

Dylan Asafo LL.M. ’20 plans to use his HLS education to help address the inequalities facing communities of color in New Zealand and the wider Pacific region.

The Harvard Gazette sat down with Richard Lazarus, a Supreme Court advocate and the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, before the coronavirus quarantine to talk about his book “The Rule of Five: Making Climate Change History at the Supreme Court.”

Students, faculty and staff in the Harvard Law School's Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic are still hard at work, pushing back against the current administration’s attempts to undo environmental regulations approved under former President Barack Obama ’91.

Jody Freeman discusses the progress the nation has made in protecting the environment since Earth Day was founded in 1970, the Trump administration’s efforts to undo Obama-era federal climate regulations, and COVID-19’s urgent lessons for the planet’s health.

Harvard Law School Professor Emily Broad Leib ’08, director of the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, and her students have been working furiously to ensure that the most vulnerable—and ultimately the rest of us—are fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program filed its first Supreme Court brief challenging the Trump administration’s waiver of laws regarding the U.S.-Mexico border wall construction. Ashley Maiolatesi ’20 recently corresponded with Harvard Law Today about what is at stake, the specific ramifications of these waivers, and her own personal connection to the project.

During Winter Term, 12 Harvard Law School students traveled to 12 countries as Cravath International Fellows to pursue clinical placements or independent research with an international, transnational, or comparative law focus.

Amid rising rates of diabetes and obesity in the nation, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School recently hosted a panel discussion concerning levies—those enacted, those proposed and those failed—on sugary beverages in jurisdictions nationwide.

The old-fashioned notion that tough guys—and tough women—must eat meat was challenged by a panel of athletes and experts at Harvard Law School, following a screening of the popular documentary “The Game Changers.”

Effective Jan. 1, three faculty members were promoted and two new scholars joined the HLS faculty.

Eloise Lawrence, a community lawyering advocate, was named assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and deputy faculty director of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.  

Emily Broad Leib ’08, founder and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, has been named clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School.