Joint Letter re nomination of Michael Dourson to EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, September 19, 2017.

Alejandro Camacho is Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, and Faculty Director, UCI Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources. He has a joint appointment in Law and Political Science. He also serves on the Board of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Professor Camacho’s scholarship explores the goals, structures, and processes of regulation, with a particular focus on natural resources and public lands law, pollution control law, and land use regulation. His writing considers the role of public participation and scientific expertise in regulation, the allocation of authority and relationships between regulatory institutions, and how the design and goals of legal institutions must and can be reshaped to more effectively account for emerging technologies and the dynamic character of natural and human systems.

His legal scholarship includes articles published or forthcoming in the Yale Journal on Regulation, Washington University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, North Carolina Law Review, Harvard Journal on Legislation, Emory Law Journal, Colorado Law Review, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, and BYU Law Review. Professor Camacho is the co-author, with fellow CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework, published by NYU Press in 2019.

Professor Camacho’s interdisciplinary research involves collaborations with experts in ecology, land use planning, political science, computer science, genetics, philosophy, and sociology. He was a co-investigator on National Science Foundation-funded research developing a collaborative cyber-infrastructure for facilitating climate change adaptation. His scientific publications include articles in BioScience, the Journal of Applied Ecology, Issues in Science and Technology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is a frequent public speaker and has contributed opinion pieces or interviews for various print and radio news outlets (including the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, The Australian, Discover, Nature Climate Change, Bloomberg, Businessweek, HuffPost, Mother Jones, The Hill, and National Public Radio stations).

Professor Camacho is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He also serves as the inaugural Director of the UCI Law Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources, which seeks to promote policy-relevant research and public engagement through conferences, lectures, publications, and stakeholder facilitation on a variety of regional and national environmental issues. He is a Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit think tank devoted to issues of environmental protection and safety. He is on the Executive Committee of UCI OCEANS, and holds a courtesy appointment in Political Science at UCI’s School of Social Sciences. He is the former chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Natural Resources.

In Fall 2017, he was the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. Before joining UCI, Professor Camacho was an Associate Professor at the Notre Dame Law School, a research fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, and practiced environmental and land use law.

Alejandro Camacho
University of California, Irvine School of Law
401 East Peltason Drive, 4500-A
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
email
website
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David M. Driesen is a University Professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is a member of the editorial board of the Carbon and Climate Law Review, published in Berlin and Environmental Law, published in Oxford.

Professor Driesen has taught and written in the areas of environmental law, international environmental law, and constitutional law for many years.

While in academia, Professor Driesen has devoted significant time to defending the constitutionality of environmental law. He represented the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund in the American Trucking case before the Supreme Court, public health groups in defending California’s Clean Fuel Fleet Programs against a preemption challenge, and constitutional law professors in defending the Endangered Species Act’s constitutionality. He also represented several United States Senators, including Hilary Clinton, in a challenge to EPA's new source review rules in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He has acted as a consultant for American Rivers and other environmental groups on Clean Water Act issues stemming from the Supreme Court's federalism decisions. And he has testified before Congress on lessons from the implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

Professor Driesen worked as a project attorney and then senior project attorney in the air and energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He also served on EPA National Pollution Control Techniques Advisory Committee. Prior to that time, he was an Assistant Attorney General in the Special Litigation Division of the Washington State Attorney General's Office and a law clerk to Justice Robert Utter of the Washington State Supreme Court.

Professor Driesen has published widely in the areas of environmental law and policy.  He edited and contributed two chapters in Economic Thought and U.S. Climate Change Policy, MIT Press 2009, and edited and contributed one chapter in Beyond Environmental Law: Policy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future, edited with fellow CPR Member Scholar Alyson Flournoy. His book, The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law (MIT Press 2003), reframes the debate over regulatory reform to take change over time into account. The book argues that static efficiency-based approaches fail to adequately address the tendency of rising population and consumption to increase environmental destruction over time. The book critiques cost-benefit analysis, emissions trading, and free trade-based restrictions on international environmental protection and recommends reforms rooted in an economic dynamic analysis. Professor Driesen received the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for the book. His most recent book, The Economic Dynamics of Law (Cambridge University Press 2012) further develops the economic dynamic theory and applies it to climate disruption and to subjects outside the environmental realm. He, along with Robert Adler and Kirsten Engel, has also written the textbook, Environmental Law: A Conceptual and Pragmatic Approach (Aspen 3rd ed. 2016).

Professor Driesen has published articles on emissions trading in  Environmental Law, Harvard Environmental Law Review, and leading environmental journals, on cost-benefit analysis in Ecology Law Quarterly, Colorado Law Review and Environmental Law, and on free trade and the environment in the Virginia Journal of International Law. His articles on constitutional law have appeared in the Cornell Law Review and elsewhere. His writing critiquing the dichotomy between "command and control" regulation and economic incentives has been especially widely cited and has helped spawn a more sophisticated third generation literature on economic incentives.

Professor Driesen is known primarily as a critic of efficiency-based law and economics and as a proponent of an alternative approach based on institutional economics and emphasizing stimulation of innovation. He plays trumpet with the Excelsior Cornet Band and the Syracuse University Brass Ensemble. Before going to law school he taught and performed in symphony orchestras in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Austria, learning German, Portuguese, and Spanish in the process.  

David Driesen
Syracuse University College of Law
Syracuse, NY 
315.443.4218
email
website

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Twitter: @dmdriesen

Carmen G. Gonzalez is the Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

She has taught courses on environmental law, hazardous waste and toxics regulation, torts, administrative law, international trade law, and international environmental law.

While in academia, Professor Gonzalez has advised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on international environmental justice matters by serving as member and vice-chair of the International Subcommittee of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Professor Gonzalez also worked as legal representative for the Basel Action Network (a non-governmental organization seeking to curb the export of hazardous wastes to developing countries) during the negotiation of the Liability Protocol to the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. In 2010-2012, Professor Gonzalez was part of a team of U.S. law professors that was awarded a $650,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to conduct environmental law capacity-building workshops for Central American law professors.  Finally, Professor Gonzalez served on the International Bar Association’s Working Group on Legal Aspects of Climate Change Adaptation and on the board of trustees of Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law firm.  In 2015, she was recognized as an environmental leader of color by Green 2.0, an organization working to increase diversity among mainstream environmental organizations, government agencies, and foundations.

After earning her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, Professor Gonzalez clerked for Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. She was subsequently an attorney at Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, where she specialized in environmental litigation. From 1991 to 1994, Professor Gonzalez worked as a transactional attorney at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. From 1994 to 1998, Professor Gonzalez was assistant regional counsel in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA). At EPA, Professor Gonzalez handled a wide variety of environmental cases involving Superfund and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. She also served on the U.S. EPA team addressing environmental problems along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Professor Gonzalez has published widely in the areas of international environmental law, environmental justice, and food security. In addition to her law journal publications, she is co-editor of International Environmental Law and the Global South (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Professor Gonzalez was a Fulbright Scholar in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she taught international environmental law at the Universidad del Salvador. She also spent a year in Ukraine working on a USAID-funded environmental law project. In 2004-2005, Professor Gonzalez served as one of four Supreme Court Fellows selected by a panel of distinguished lawyers and judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States. Professor Gonzalez was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University’s Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and a visiting professor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, a joint project of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Nanjing. In 2010-2011, she served as chair of the Environmental Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and she currently serves as co-chair of the Research Committee of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law. Professor Gonzalez was selected as the George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University School of Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary for Spring 2017.

Carmen Gonzalez
Loyola University Chicago School of Law
Corboy Law Center
25 E. Pearson
Chicago, IL 60611
312-915-7044
email

website

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
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Mary L. Lyndon is a Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law.

Professor Lyndon's areas of interest include science, economics and the law, and their influence on regulation and liability. Her scholarship has concentrated on the interplay of law and the economics of information and innovation and the ways these dynamics shape social learning about technology. Professor Lyndon teaches Environmental Law, International Environmental Law, Torts and Toxic Torts.

In 1979 Professor Lyndon became an Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York. In that capacity she headed a group of attorneys working on acid rain toxic air pollution, and a wide range of other environmental problems. She litigated at all levels of the state and federal courts, and presented testimony before state and federal legislative committees on behalf of New York and the National Association of the Attorneys General. In 1985-86 she was the Silver Fellow in Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University and she joined the law faculty at St. John's in 1986. Professor Lyndon received a J.D. from Northeastern University in 1974 and the J.S.D. degree from Columbia University in 1995.

Professor Lyndon practiced communications law from 1974 until 1979. First, as General Counsel to the New Jersey Coalition for Fair Broadcasting, she conducted litigation before the Federal Communications Commission, challenging the VHF TV channel allocations for the Northeast; she also developed a federal legislative initiative to move a channel allocation to New Jersey and negotiated agreements on coverage of New Jersey by New York and Philadelphia broadcasters. Later she was corporate counsel to New Jersey Bell Telephone Company and AT&T. She represented the operating company in rate cases before the state utility commission; in the federal antitrust challenge to the structure of the Bell System, she worked on AT&T's defense to the charge of predatory innovation in the development of the long distance microwave system.

During law school Professor Lyndon worked at the Citizen's Communications Center and the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, both in Washington, D.C. Before law school she worked as a program officer in the Courts Division of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, USDOJ, and on the program evaluation staff of the Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare. Professor Lyndon is admitted to practice in New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia and is an active member of the Environmental Law Section, New York State Bar Association. She is also a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the ABA, the AALS, the AALS, and Law and Society.

Professor Lyndon's law review articles include: “Secrecy and Access in an Innovation Intensive Economy: Reordering Information Privileges in Environmental, Health, and safety Law”, 78 U. Colo. L. Rev. 465 (2007),  ;; "Tort Law, Preemption and Risk Management," 2 Widener L. Symp. J. 69 St. John's L. Rev. 191 (1996); “Tort Law and Technology”, 12 Yale J. on Reg. 137 (1995), "Secrecy and Innovation in Tort Law and Regulation," 23 N.M. L. Rev. 1 (1993);), "Information Economics and Chemical Toxicity: Designing Laws to Produce and Use Data," 87 Mich. L. Rev. 401 (1989), "Risk Assessment, Risk Communication and Legitimacy: Introduction to the Symposium on Health Risk Assessment," 14 Col. J. Env. L. 289 (1989). She also has contributed chapters to two books: "Characterizing the Regulatory and Judicial Setting," in Tools to Aid Environmental Decision Making, ed. V. Dale and M. English (Springer 1999) and "Dialogue in Environmental Politics: Toward an Ethic of Curiosity," in Moral Imperialism: A Critical Anthology, ed. B. Hernandez (2002 NYU Press).

Mary Lyndon
St. John's University School of Law
Jamaica, NY
718.990.6011
email
website

Martha T. McCluskey is a Professor and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York, in Buffalo, New York.

Professor McCluskey's teaching has included courses on constitutional law, torts, insurance, regulation, economic inequality, and the relationships between work and family. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School and a J.S.D. with distinction from Columbia Law School. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Before entering academia she was an attorney for the Maine Public Advocate Office, focusing on the regulation of workers’ compensation insurance and public utilities.

Professor McCluskey’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between economics and inequality in law. She has written extensively on how economic ideas and economic influences have shaped social welfare programs, regulatory policy, and contemporary legal theory. She is working on a book project titled A Field Guide to Law, Economics and Justice. Earlier publications include a major study of workers’ compensation reform laws, several articles analyzing workers’ compensation insurance regulation, and a number of articles on welfare policy and social citizenship.

Much of her work explores the connections between economics and feminist legal theory, focusing especially on the impact of economic ideology on gender equity. This work has included analysis of the legal treatment of work and family caretaking in a range of policy arenas, including welfare reform, social insurance, international trade and development policy, and income tax law. As a participant in events sponsored by Emory University’s project on Vulnerability and the Human Condition, she is part of an interdisciplinary effort to re-examine the classic liberal ideal of individual autonomy as a foundational principle of law and policy, and to shift the focus to human interdependence and to questions of power and privilege in distributing institutional support for human vulnerabilities. She is the co-editor, with Emory University Professor Martha A. Fineman, of Feminism, Media, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Another strand of her work applies her focus on equality and economics to disability law, including both benefit systems such as workers’ compensation and antidiscrimination doctrine. This work examines how disability fits within but also reshapes theories of equality based on race, gender, sexuality, and economic class.

Professor McCluskey’s writing has also examined economic inequality in constitutional law, not just as a question of equal protection but in ideas about due process. Finally, she has written several articles on the contemporary influence of economic politics and ideologically driven funding on legal theory and scholarship.

In addition to her writing, she is a co-organizer of the ClassCrits project, which brings together scholars in law, economics, and other disciplines to develop a critical legal analysis of economic inequality through workshops, conference panels, scholarly publications, and a blog, at www.classcrits.org. She is also a member of the Society of American Law Teachers, the American Constitution Society, the National Lawyers Guild, and a frequent participant in the LatCrit scholarly community.

Martha T. McCluskey
University at Buffalo Law School
The State University of New York
716.645.2326
email
website
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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

Karen Sokol is Associate Professor of Law at the Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans. 

Karen Sokol joined the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law faculty in 2009. Her teaching and research interests include environmental law, torts, products liability, and law and philosophy. Her current scholarship focuses on legal controls on marketing of dangerous products, climate change resilience, particularly for vulnerable countries such as Cuba and India, and, most recently, on the potential for forging more robust environmental and public health protections by incorporating Indian philosophy into Western jurisprudence, law, and policy. She will spend the spring of 2018 researching in India, supported by a Fulbright Award.

Professor Sokol graduated from Yale Law School, where she served as Articles Editor for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal and was a member of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. After law school, she clerked for Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate in the appellate section of Vinson & Elkins, LLP. She then worked as a policy analyst for the Center for Progressive Reform, writing a number of papers and articles on environmental and public health issues, with a focus on government transparency and corporate accountability. The year before coming to Loyola, she was a fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. She is admitted to practice in the state of Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. 

Karen Sokol
Loyola University New Orleans College of Law
New Orleans, Louisiana
504.861.5593
email
website
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Rena Steinzor is the Edward M. Robertson Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and a past president of the Center for Progressive Reform. She is the author of Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction.

Professor Steinzor has taught an environmental law survey course, seminars in risk assessments and critical issues in environmental law and science, administrative law, contracts, torts and counseling and negotiation. She has written in the areas of (1) regulatory dysfunction in agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment; (2) the role of centralized White House review on the protectiveness of regulation; (3) environmental federalism, including so-called "unfunded mandates" imposed on state and local governments by the federal government and the impact on public health of devolving authority and responsibility for solving environmental problems; (4) the implications of industry self-regulation on the protection of the environment and human health; (5) "market-based" alternatives to traditional regulation; and (6) political interference with regulatory science.

She is the editor, with Christopher Schroeder, of the CPR-sponsored book A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment, published by Carolina Academic Press. She is also the editor, with Wendy Wagner, of the book Rescuing Science from Politics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Her book, Mother Earth and Uncle Sam: How Pollution and Hollow Government Hurt Our Kids was published by the University of Texas Press in December 2007. With Professor Sidney Shapiro of Wake Forest Law School, she 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 published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010.

Professor Steinzor began her legal career in 1976, and entered academia in January 1994. From 1987 through 1993, she was associated - first as "of counsel" and ultimately as the partner in charge of the environmental practice - at Spiegel & McDiarmid, a 45-lawyer, Washington, D.C. firm representing approximately 400 cities, counties, states, and public agencies in the energy, environmental, communications, and transportation fields. The practice counseled federal, state, and municipal clients regarding compliance with federal and state laws and regulations.

Prior to joining Spiegel & McDiarmid, Professor Steinzor served as Staff Counsel, Subcommittee on Commerce, Transportation, and Tourism of the Energy and Commerce Committee, U.S. House of Representatives (James J. Florio, Chairman). She was the primary staff person responsible for legislation that became the "Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986" (Public Law 99-499) and the "Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act" (Public Law 99-519). She also prepared legislation to reauthorize the Toxic Substances Control Act during the 98th Congress.

Professor Steinzor has testified before Congress on several occasions, most recently regarding the impact of health, safety, and environmental regulations on the economy.

Rena Steinzor
University of Maryland Carey School of Law
Baltimore, MD
410.706 0564
email
website