Matthew Shudtz, J.D., is the former Executive Director of the Center for Progressive Reform. He joined CPR in 2006 as policy analyst, after graduating law school with a certificate in environmental law, and left the organization in 2020 to see to family needs amidst the coronavirus pandemic. As a staff attorney in the Environmental Law Clinic, he worked on litigation with the Environmental Integrity Project that led to a consent decree in which the Mirant Corporation agreed to comply with newer, more stringent opacity and particulate matter standards for its Chalk Point generating station, one of the largest power plants in Maryland.
Mr. Shudtz’s prior experience in the public interest field also includes work for the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he was a legal intern. While at NRDC, he provided research and drafting support in FIFRA and CAA litigation, and CWA regulatory affairs. He also worked as a legal/legislative intern at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation during the 2005 Session of the Maryland General Assembly. He received his J.D. from the University of Maryland and a B.S. from Columbia University.
Contact Information: 202.747.0698 ex. 1 email
David Flores, J.D., is a CPR Senior Policy Analyst. He joined CPR in 2016 to work on climate adaptation policy and advocacy. Before joining CPR, Mr. Flores spent eight years working for watershed nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore, where he managed water quality monitoring research, legal and regulatory advocacy, and Clean Water Act compliance monitoring and enforcement programming.
Mr. Flores received his law degree from the University of Maryland in 2016, cum laude, with a certificate of concentration in environmental law, and his B.A. from Bard College in environmental science in 2008.
Contact Information:
202.747.0698 ext. 9
email
Media relations consultant Matthew Freeman worked with CPR for more than 17 years, assisting the organization as it developed its media strategies and online communications. He left the organization in 2020.
His media relations experience in Washington spans more than 35 years, and his client list includes a range of organizations active on the environment, education, civil rights and liberties, health care, progressive organizing in the interfaith community, and more.
James Goodwin, J.D., M.P.P., is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform. He joined CPR in May of 2008. Prior to joining CPR, Mr. Goodwin worked as a legal intern for the Environmental Law Institute and EcoLogix Group, Inc. He is a published author with articles on human rights and environmental law and policy appearing in the Michigan Journal of Public Affairs and the New England Law Review (co-author with Armin Rosencranz).
Mr. Goodwin graduated magna cum laude from Kalamazoo College, where he received a B.A. with honors in Political Science. He received his law degree (with a certificate in environmental law) from the University of Maryland School of Law, where he graduated magna cum laude, and his master’s degree in public policy (concentration in environmental policy) from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, where he graduated as class valedictorian. While at the University of Maryland School of Law, Mr. Goodwin was a member of the Moot Court team. He is a member of Order of the Coif and Phi Beta Kappa.
Contact Information:
202.747.0698 ext. 5
email
Brian Gumm is the Communications Director at the Center for Progressive Reform. Prior to joining CPR in March 2016, he spent nearly a decade in several roles at the Center for Effective Government, including communications director and senior writer.
Mr. Gumm's previous public interest experience includes time with the Alliance for Healthy Homes, American Farmland Trust, and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He has been quoted by a number of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Dallas Morning News, and his work has appeared in several publications.
Mr. Gumm earned a B.S. in environmental policy from Northland College and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Contact Information:
202.747.0698 ext. 2
email
Catherine Jones manages CPR's general administration, project production, distribution, reporting, and conference planning. Ms. Jones joined CPR in October 2005. Prior to joining CPR, she worked as a Property Manager in the commercial office field for over 15 years in the Baltimore, Washington, and Virginia real estate markets. Working for premier commercial office management companies, she developed an extensive expertise in financial reporting and analysis, human resource management, construction management, and project management. She served numerous private and institutional clients, both foreign and domestic. Her favorite aspect of property management was tenant relations and getting the opportunity to work with a wide variety of tenants, both small and large, and helping them meet their office space needs.
Contact Information:
202.747.0698 ext. 3
email
Darya Minovi, MPH, was a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform. She is a public health advocate passionate about environmental justice and the use of research to inform policies that protect human health and safeguard the environment.
Before joining CPR, she worked on food policy issues at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and on international rainforest conservation with Health In Harmony in Portland, Oregon. She also worked as an Environmental Justice intern with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Ms. Minovi received her Master of Public Health in Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2019, and her Bachelor of Science in Public Health and Environmental Policy from the College of William & Mary in 2014.
Katlyn Schmitt, J.D., is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform. She joined CPR in 2020 to work on environmental policy, enforcement, and advocacy.
Before joining CPR, Mrs. Schmitt spent four years working as the Legal and Policy Director for Waterkeepers Chesapeake, where she provided legal assistance to Waterkeepers and advocated for legislative and regulatory priorities in Maryland, D.C., Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Mrs. Schmitt received her law degree from the University of Maryland in 2015, cum laude, with a certificate of concentration in environmental law, and her B.A. from Messiah College in Political Science in 2011, magna cum laude.
Contact Information:
202.747.0698 ext. 8
email
Katie Tracy, J.D., was a Senior Policy Analyst focused on workers’ rights policy. Her previous experience included working for more than two years as a regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Effective Government, where she advocated for strong regulations to protect health, safety, and the environment. She also produced a report examining OSHA’s whistleblower protection program and proposing model state legislation to protect workers from retaliation.
Robert R.M. Verchick holds the Gauthier ~ St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans, is the Faculty Director of the Center for Environmental Law at Loyola, and is a Senior Fellow in Disaster Resilience Leadership, Tulane University. He is the President of the Center for Progressive Reform.
Verchick is an expert in climate change law, disaster law, and environmental regulation. In 2009 and 2010, he served in the Obama administration as Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In that role he helped develop climate adaptation policy for the EPA and served on President Obama's Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. In the fall of 2012, he researched climate adaptation policies in India as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, supported by a Fulbright Award.
His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law journals at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. He is an author of three books, including the award-winning, Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press 2010). Professor Verchick has taught as a visitor at several schools, including Peking University (China) and Aarhus University (Denmark), and has received several teaching awards. He has lectured across the United States, Europe, and Asia
Robert R.M. Verchick
Loyola University New Orleans
New Orleans, LA
504.861.5472
email
website
Twitter
Robert L. Glicksman is the J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform.
Professor Glicksman has expertise in both of the two main branches of environmental law, pollution control and public natural resources law. His recent research has focused largely on climate change issues, public natural resources issues, and the intersection of the two. He has taught three different environmental law courses -- a survey course covering both of these branches and more specialized courses in regulation of air and water pollution and toxic substances and hazardous waste regulation. He also regularly teaches property law (including regulatory takings cases involving environmental controls) and administrative law. Professor Glicksman has written on all of these topics for more than 25 years.
Professor Glicksman worked in private practice for four years after graduating from the Cornell Law School. He practiced for Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, a nationally recognized law firm with an office in Washington, D.C., serving industrial clients in the energy and chemical industries. Professor Glicksman returned to private practice in 1993-94 while on leave from the University of Kansas. During that time, he worked for Lowenstein Sandler, a firm in Roseland, N.J. with a thriving environmental law practice, providing advice to clients on hazardous waste-related issues.
In addition to his experiences in private practice, Professor Glicksman served as a consultant to the Secretariat for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. The CEC is an international organization established by the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (the environmental side agreement to NAFTA) on issues pertaining to the resolution of international disputes among Canada, Mexico, and the United States on issues of both domestic and international environmental law. Professor Glicksman's role was to provide advice concerning the proper disposition of submissions by NGOs seeking a finding by the CEC that the signatory parties have failed to effectively enforce their environmental laws.
Professor Glicksman has published widely in the areas of pollution control, public natural resources management, and administrative law. His book Risk Regulation At Risk: Restoring a Pragmatic Balance (Stanford University Press 2003, with Sidney Shapiro), takes issue with the notion that economic efficiency should be the sole or even principal criterion governing the establishment and implementation of laws and regulations designed to reduce the health and environmental risks attributable to industrial activities. The authors urge instead a pragmatic approach to risk regulation that takes into account other values. Professor Glicksman is the lead co-author of an environmental law casebook, Environmental Protection: Law and Policy (Aspen Law and Business), now in its fifth edition (with Professors Markell, Buzbee, Mandelker, and Tarlock). Professor Glicksman is also the co-author (with George C. Coggins) of the leading treatise on public land and resource management, Public Natural Resources Law, (now in its second edition), as well as a student nutshell on the same subject, Modern Public Land Law (now in its third edition). He has also contributed a chapter entitled, “Federal Preemption by Inaction,” in Preemptive Choice: The Theory, Law, and Reality of Federalism’s Core Question, 2009, edited by fellow CPR Member Scholar William Buzbee, and “Environmental Law,” in Kansas Annual Survey, 2007.
Professor Glicksman's law review articles have been published in journals that include the Pennsylvania Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, the Virginia Environmental Law Journal, the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, the William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review, the Oregon Law Review, the Loyola Law Review, The Administrative Law Review, the Chicago-Kent Law Review, and the Denver University Law Review. Two of Professor Glicksman's articles on judicial review of environmental decision-making (co-authored with Christopher Schroeder, a CPR Board member), have been singled out for recognition as the best in the field for a particular year and have been republished in the Land Use & Environment Law Review. A third article by Professor Glicksman on regulatory takings was also republished in that review. Another of Professor Glicksman's articles, on the Supreme Court and its treatment of environmental law issues, was designated in 1994 by Professor William Rodgers of the University of Washington as one of the 25 best environmental law articles ever written.
Professor Glicksman was instrumental in the expansion of the environmental law curriculum at the University of Kansas School of Law. He helped to establish a certificate program in environmental and natural resources law. He is now the J.B. & Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the George Washington University Law School.
Robert Glicksman
The George Washington University Law School
2000 H Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20052
202.994.4641
Alice Kaswan is a Professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law.
Professor Kaswan received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and a B.S., with highest honors, in Conservation and Resource Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. After law school, she clerked for the Hon. Marie L. Garibaldi on the New Jersey Supreme Court. She then practiced land use and environmental law with Berle, Kass, & Case, a boutique environmental and land use law firm in New York City, and environmental law with Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius’ New York City office. She taught at Catholic University School of Law from 1995 until 1999, and joined the USF faculty in 1999. At USF, she teaches Environmental Law, Administrative Law, International Environmental Law, and Property.
Professor Kaswan’s recent scholarship has focused on the federalism and environmental justice implications of domestic climate change policy. Earlier work explored theories of environmental justice and the relationship between environmental laws and the pursuit of environmental justice.
Alice Kaswan
University of San Francisco School of Law
415.422.5053
email
website
SSRN
Thomas O. McGarity holds the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law at the University of Texas in Austin. He is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform, and a past president of the organization.
Professor McGarity has taught and written in the areas of Administrative Law, Environmental Law, Occupational Safety and Health Law, Food Safety Law, Science and the Law, and Torts for twenty-five years.
While in academia, McGarity has served as a consultant and/or advisor to the Administrative Conference of the United States, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress (OTA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Texas Department of Agriculture, and the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. With Professor Sidney A. Shapiro, Professor McGarity designed and helped initiate a rulemaking prioritization process for OSHA rulemaking during the early 1990s. As a consultant to OTA, Professor McGarity helped write the "Regulatory Tools" report that agencies have frequently cited in designing regulatory programs. As a consultant to the Texas Department of Agriculture, McGarity was a primary draftsperson of that agency's first farmworker protection regulations in the late 1980s. During the mid-1990s, he was also actively involved in the drafting of and negotiations surrounding the federal Food Quality Protection Act.
Professor McGarity began his legal career in the Office of General Counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency. In the private sector, Professor McGarity has served as counsel or consultant in various legal and administrative proceedings to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the American Lung Association, the National Audubon Society, Texas Rural Legal Aid, California Rural Legal Aid, and many local organizations, including, for example, The Bear Creek Citizens for the Best Environment Ever. McGarity has also served on many advisory committees for such entities as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Professor McGarity has published widely in the areas of regulatory law and policy. His book Reinventing Rationality analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of cost-benefit analysis in regulatory decision-making and describes the use of such regulatory impact assessments by federal agencies and the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan Administration. Workers at Risk, co-authored with Sidney A. Shapiro, describes rulemaking, implementation and enforcement in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from its inception in 1970 through 1990. The book then analyzes OSHA's strengths and weaknesses and makes many recommendations for improving standard-setting and enforcement. McGarity's casebook, The Law of Environmental Protection, co-authored with John Bonine, has been used in introductory Environmental Law courses at law schools throughout the country. His relatively recent books include The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries, Yale University Press 2008, and Bending Science: How Special Interest Corrupt Public Health Research, Harvard University Press 2008, co-authored with fellow CPR Member Scholar Wendy Wagner.
Professor McGarity has published dozens of articles on environmental law, administrative law, and toxic torts in prominent law reviews, such as the Harvard Law Review, Chicago Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review and Law & Contemporary Problems, as well as in specialty journals, such as the Administrative Law Review, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, Risk, and the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, and consumer magazines like the American Prospect and the Hastings Center Report. McGarity has written on federal regulation of biotechnology since the advent of the commercialization of recombinant DNA techniques, and his article in the Duke Law Journal on the "ossification" of the federal rulemaking process, which elaborates on the dangers of encumbering the process of promulgating health and environmental rules with burdensome analytical requirements and review procedures, is frequently cited in the recurrent "regulatory reform" debates.
Professor McGarity has been an active participant in efforts to improve health, safety and environmental quality in the United States. He has testified before many congressional committees on environmental, administrative law, preemption of state tort laws in cases involving medical devices, and occupational safety and health issues. During the first session of the 104th Congress (the "Gingrich" Congress), Professor McGarity was frequently the lone representative of the view that federal regulation had an important role to play in protecting public health and the environment on panels testifying before House and Senate Committee considering "regulatory reform" legislation. Professor McGarity has also participated in path-breaking legal challenges to government inaction like Environmental Defense Fund v. Blum (a challenge to EPA's decision to allow further use of the carcinogenic pesticide mirex through emergency use exemptions) and Les v. Reilly (a challenge to EPA's failure to establish protective tolerances for eight carcinogenic pesticides). As a result of the latter litigation, the pesticide industry was forced to accept the greater protections afforded children in the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996.
Thomas McGarity
The University of Texas School of Law
Austin, TX
512.232.1384
email
website
Joel A. Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Law and C. William Trout Senior Fellow in Public Interest Law at Nova Southeastern University Law Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
For more than 30 years, Professor Mintz has taught a variety of substantive and clinical environmental law courses, including offerings on the federal law of pollution control, comparative environmental law, environmental aspects of land use planning, and other subjects. He has written extensively on environmental enforcement, the Superfund program, growth management, sustainable development, and certain international environmental agreements.
Professor Mintz co-founded Nova Southeastern Law Center's in-house Environmental and Land Use Law Clinic, which provides representation to environmental citizens groups and neighborhood organizations in matters that concern implementation of the Florida Growth Management Act and protection of the Everglades and the Florida Keys. He has testified as a legal expert witness in judicial and administrative proceedings, and has given numerous presentations on environmental topics at gatherings of professional and trade associations and on radio and television public affairs broadcasts.
Professor Mintz serves on the board of directors of the Everglades Law Center, Inc., a not-for-profit environmental public interest law firm based in South Florida. He chairs that firm's Litigation Screening Committee.
Mintz is an elected member of the Environmental Law Commission of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and of the International Council on Environmental Law, and he is a member of the Environmental Law Institute, the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects, and other professional, environmental, bar and civic organizations. He is a member of the executive committee of the Section on State and Local Government Law of the Association of American Law Schools, whose Section newsletter he has edited annually since 1991. He has also served on the Committee on Source Removal of Contaminants in the Subsurface of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.
In the early and mid-1970's, on a pro-bono basis, Professor Mintz lobbied successfully for the passage of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. In recognition of those voluntary efforts, President Carter invited him to attend the White House ceremony at which that statute was formally signed into law.
Prior to becoming a professor at Nova Southeastern, Professor Mintz worked for six years as an enforcement attorney and supervisory attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago and Washington, D.C. He handled or supervised numerous complex cases involving air, water, and hazardous waste/groundwater pollution from such varied industries as iron and steel, electric utilities, petroleum, pulp and paper, portland cement, and rubber manufacturing. Mintz was the lead attorney on the first EPA criminal contempt case brought in a U.S. District Court to redress a knowing violation of a signed Consent Decree; and he served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Wisconsin with respect to a precedent-setting Grand Jury investigation into criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. In recognition of his EPA enforcement work, he received EPA's Special Service Award as well as its Bronze Medal for Commendable Service.
Professor Mintz also worked (more briefly) as a law clerk with both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Public Education Association, and as an editor for West Publishing Company (now West Group, Inc.) in New York.
Professor Mintz has published extensively in the fields of environmental law and state and local taxation and finance. He authored a critically acclaimed history of EPA's enforcement programs, Enforcement at the EPA: High Stakes and Hard Choices (University of Texas Press, 1995), and a well received treatise on the potential liabilities of subnational governments under federal environmental laws, State and Local Government Environmental Liability (West Group, Inc., 1994), which he has updated on an annual basis.Mintz also co-authored an introductory casebook on environmental law (published in 2000 by Lexis-Nexis, Inc.), Environmental Enforcement: Cases and Materials, (with CPR Member Scholar Clifford Rechtschaffen and Robert Kuehn, Carolina Academic Press, 2007), and State and Local Taxation and Finance in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition (with Gelfand and Salsich, West Group, Inc., 2007).
In addition, Professor Mintz has written several book chapters and contributions, and he is the author of numerous law review articles that have appeared in journals published at Harvard, Yale, Virginia, Georgetown, Columbia and other well known law schools. His journal articles have repeatedly been considered to be among the 30 best articles of the year in the environmental law field by peer reviewers.
Professor Mintz has consulted, on an informal basis, with officials of the EPA with regard to environmental issues and policy matters. He has peer reviewed the written work of other academics in several disciplines. His name appears on a list, compiled by the U.S. Department of State, of potential speakers at U.S. embassies and consulates with respect to environmental issues.
Joel Mintz
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center
Ft. Lauderdale, FL
954.262.6160
email
website
Sidney A. Shapiro holds the Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at the Wake Forest University School of Law and is the Associate Dean for Research and Development. He is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform.
Professor Shapiro has taught and written in the areas of Administrative Law, Regulatory Law and Policy, Environmental Policy, and Occupational Safety and Health Law for 25 years.
While in academia, Shapiro has served as a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress (OTA), and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). With Professor Thomas O. McGarity, Professor Shapiro designed and helped initiate a rulemaking prioritization process for OSHA rulemaking during the early 1990s. As a consultant to OTA, Professor Shapiro assessed various regulatory tools or options that agencies can use to implement regulation. As a consultant to ACUS, Professor Shapiro studied the efficacy of the regulatory process at EPA (noise control), OSHA, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Professor Shapiro began his legal career as a trial attorney in the Bureau of Competition of the Federal Trade Commission and later worked as the Deputy Legal Counsel, Secretary's Review Panel on New Drug Regulation at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Professor Shapiro has published widely in the areas of regulatory law and policy. He co-authored The People’s Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety, and the Environment, with CPR President, Rena Steinzor. This book reviewed years of government actions and inactions leading to the decline of the five protector agencies. His book, Risk Regulation at Risk: Restoring a Pragmatic Approach, analyzes health and safety and environmental protection laws and policy, and argues for a pragmatic approach to policy in these areas instead of using economic analysis to set regulatory goals. Workers at Risk, co-authored with Thomas O. McGarity, describes rulemaking, implementation and enforcement in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from its inception in 1970 through 1990. The book analyzes OSHA's strengths and weaknesses and makes many recommendations for improving standard-setting and enforcement. Shapiro's casebook, Administrative Law and Procedure: A Problem Approach, co-authored with William Funk and Russell Weaver, is used in administrative law courses at law schools throughout the country. His casebook, Regulatory Policy and Law, is the first of its kind, and is used to train lawyers to evaluate and advocate for public policy.
Professor Shapiro has published dozens of articles on regulatory policy, health and safety laws, environmental law and administrative law in prominent law reviews, such as the Harvard Law Review, Duke Law Journal and the Wake Forest Law Review, as well as in specialty journals, such as the Administrative Law Review and the Ecology Law Quarterly.
Professor Shapiro has been an active participant in efforts to improve health, safety and environmental quality in the United States. He has testified before congressional committees on administrative law and occupational safety and health issues. He has worked with various public interest groups in advisory and support capacities, including Public Citizen Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen Congress Watch, and OMB Watch.
Sidney Shapiro
Wake Forest University School of Law
Winston-Salem, NC
336.758.7320
email
website
Amy Sinden is a Professor of Law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and at the Temple-Tsinghua Masters of Law program in Beijing, China.
Professor Sinden has taught, lectured, and written in the areas of environmental law, natural resources law, regulatory design, and cost-benefit analysis, human rights, and climate change.
Before joining the Temple Law School faculty in 2001, Professor Sinden served as senior counsel for Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, handling litigation on behalf of PennFuture and other citizens' and environmental groups. Prior to this position, she was an associate attorney for Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund (formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) in Seattle, Washington, where she represented a range of environmental, fishing, and other groups in litigation focusing on endangered species, clean water, and water conservation issues. In addition to her involvement with environmental issues, Professor Sinden was an attorney at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, where she represented parents in civil child abuse and neglect proceedings, and advocated on behalf of welfare recipients seeking job training and education. Professor Sinden served twice as a law clerk, first for Judge John F. Gerry of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, and later for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Sinden graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1991.
Professor Sinden's recent academic writings have criticized the misuse of economic theory in environmental law, arguing against the use of cost-benefit analysis in environmental standard setting and countering claims that private property rights can solve environmental problems in the absence of government regulation. She has also written about the application of classical human rights norms to environmental conflicts. Recent publications include Formality and Informality in Cost-Benefit Analysis, 2015 Utah L. Rev. 93, The Missing Instrument: Dirty Input Limits, 33 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 65 (2009), with fellow CPR Member Scholar David Driesen, Cost-Benefit Analysis: New Foundationas on Shifting Sand, 3 Reg. & Governance 48 (2009), with Douglas Kysar and David Driesen, The Tragedy of the Commons and the Myth of a Private Property Solution, 78 U. COLO. L. REV. 533 (2007).
Amy Sinden
Temple University Beasley School of Law
Philadelphia, PA
215.204.4969
email
website
Staff and Board members of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) denounce the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Memorial Day. We stand with the peaceful protestors calling for radical, systemic reforms to root out racism from our society and all levels of our governing institutions and the policies they administer.
CPR Member Scholars and staff are dedicated to listening to and working alongside Black communities and non-Black people of color to call out racism and injustice and demand immediate and long-lasting change. Racism and bigotry cannot continue in the United States if our nation is to live up to its creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
CPR's vision is thriving communities and a resilient planet. That ideal animates all of our work, but systemic sources of inequality and injustice stand as massive barriers to the realization of that vision. To do our part to tear down those barriers, we're engaging in a deliberate effort to engage collaboratively with the communities most affected by the policies at the heart of our work.
As an institution, our primary tools for change are communication and collaboration. Our communication involves not just speaking, but listening, particularly to people affected by pollution, workplace and product safety hazards, and more. Our collaboration is increasingly aimed at empowering voices that are too often silenced. Like many other organizations, we are currently undergoing an intensive process to ensure that justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are part of our organizational DNA. We are committed to constant institutional improvement – to recognizing our privilege and using it to promote a more just and equitable society.
The recent murder of George Floyd gives new urgency to CPR's work. The fact that this murder is just the latest in a long history of deaths of African Americans at the hands of government officials who have escaped with little, if any, public accountability only reinforces the magnitude of the challenges we at CPR face in doing our part to address systemic racism in our society. We condemn Floyd's murder in the strongest possible terms. But we also accept that we must do more.
The simple fact is too many people of color in this country can't breathe. Sometimes it's because they have a cop kneeling on their neck; sometimes it's because through our laws and other institutions, we as a society have concentrated them in "sacrifice zones" whose residents are assaulted daily with toxic air and water while they are denied access to needed health care. The weight of this reality has never been clearer than during a pandemic of a respiratory virus that's more likely to kill people who breathe dirty air daily. The two are connected, even if that connection is ignored by our nation's leaders.
Top image by Flickr user Victoria Pickering, used under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.