Joint Letter from CPR Member Scholars and staff to House Committee Leaders re Implementation of TSCA amendments.

Carl F. Cranor is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and a participating faculty member in Environmental Toxicology.

Professor Cranor's generic specialization is in legal and moral philosophy. His research for the past 18 years has been on theoretical issues that arise in the legal and scientific adjudication of risks from toxic substances and from the new genetic technologies. He has taught courses to undergraduates and graduate students on environmental ethics, philosophy of law, justice, the history of ethics, the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, philosophical issues in torts and in the criminal law, the regulation of toxic substances, and issues concerning the use of science in regulation and the tort law.

As a result of his research Professor Cranor has been invited to give presentations to the practicing bar, governmental officials, public interest groups, a Centers for Disease Control project, as well as a national security project and some other professional groups. He has done some work as an expert witness and as consultant to a few law firms. He was also a co-author of an Amicus Brief in the U.S. Supreme Court Dow Chemical Co., Monsanto Co., et. al. vs. Stephenson and Issacson (2003) the recent "Agent Orange" Litigation.
Professor Cranor was a Congressional Fellow and a consultant at the Office of Technology Assessment and has served on peer review panels at the National Science Foundation, the University of California Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program, the UC Biotechnology Research and Teaching Program, and the Coordinating Board of the University of California Water Resources Center.

His expertise has led to service on two Science Advisory Panels-the State of California's Proposition 65 Science Advisory Panel (1989-1992) and on the California Department of Health and Human Services' Electric and Magnetic Fields Science Advisory Panel (1999-2002). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel to Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences (1990) and currently serves on the Institute of Medicine's Committee to Evaluate Measures of Health Benefits for Environmental, Health and Safety Regulation.

Professor Cranor has published widely on the use of science in the regulatory and tort law and given numerous presentations to legal, scientific, philosophic and public interest groups. His Cambridge University Press book, Toxic Torts: Science, Law and the Possibility of Justice (2008), has been critically acclaimed as achieving “the almost impossible goal of a learned, readable, and exciting book on the torturous interactions between law and science in tort litigation,” by PhD Professor Ellen K. Silbergeld of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He published Regulating Toxic Substances: A Philosophy of Science and the Law (Oxford University Press, 1993, paperback 1997), edited Are Genes Us? The Social Consequences of the New Genetics (Rutgers University Press, 1994) and co-authored the U.S. Congress' Office of Technology Assessment Report, Identifying and Regulating Carcinogens (1987). Regulating Toxic Substances discussed some of the tensions between science and the law and argued for the sensitive use of science in legal venues to prevent science from being used as a weapon on one side of the law and to avoid distorting the aims of the law. Identifying and Regulating Carcinogens, reviewed the Executive Branch's regulation of carcinogens through its various agencies and found that that fewer than one-half of the carcinogens under the authority of agencies had been addressed in regulation. His articles have appeared in philosophic, scientific and law journals, including The American Philosophical Quarterly, Ethics, Law and Philosophy, Science and Engineering Ethics, The Yale Law Journal, The Industrial Relations Law Journal, Risk Analysis, Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, Risk: Health, Safety and the Environment, the Virginia Environmental Law Journal, Jurimetrics, Law and Contemporary Problems, Plant Physiology, the European Journal of Oncology, the American Journal of Public Health.

Professor Cranor was educated as an undergraduate in mathematics and as a graduate student in philosophy and in law, receiving a Master of Studies in Law from Yale. He has used all of that training in his research and teaching. His research has been supported by more than $1,000,000 in research grants and fellowships, including numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and the University of California Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program.

He is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998) and an Elected Fellow of the Collegium Ramazinni (named in honor of Bernardino Ramazzini, one of the first occupational physicians), an international organization of scholars that seeks to advance the study of occupational and environmental health issues around the world (2003).

Carl Cranor
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA,
951.827.2353
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
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

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

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

Wendy E. Wagner holds the Richard Dale Endowed Chair at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, Texas. Prior to joining the University of Texas Law faculty, Professor Wagner was a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and School of Management, and was a visiting professor at the Columbia Law School and the Vanderbilt Law School.

Professor Wagner has taught a number of courses on environmental topics. Within the law school, she has taught an Environmental Law survey course, an advanced course on Toxics, a survey course on Regulation, and seminars on Law and Science and Citizen Participation in Environmental Law (in this latter seminar, the students wrote citizen guides designed to educate citizens about their rights under the environmental laws). Wagner has also co-taught interdisciplinary University-wide courses and seminars on: Lead and the Environment; The Great Lakes and the Environment; Environmental Priority Setting; Environmental Justice; the Automobile and the Environment; and Complex Problem Solving: A Case Study on the Environment. Wagner writes primarily in the area of environmental law and science, exploring the ways that science is used and misused in decision-making by the courts, Congress, and the agencies.

While in academia, Professor Wagner has participated as an officer or committee member in a number of professional societies, including several sections of the American Bar Association; the Society for Risk Analysis; the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists; and a task force initiated by U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich.

Professor Wagner has also participated as a speaker at various conferences convened for the practicing bar, environmental scientists, and governmental policymakers. Professor Wagner has spoken at local bar associations, given presentations for Continuing Legal Education programs, spoken at a variety of scientific meetings, and presented papers at meetings convened for government officials by the U.S. EPA and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Professor Wagner was a guest speaker on the national public radio show "Science Friday" (part of "Talk of the Nation"), which spotlighted the EPA's recently promulgated standards for ozone and particulates. Professor Wagner was also an invited expert for a hearing on delegation convened by the Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs of the House Committee on Government Reform, U.S. Congress.

Professor Wagner recently collaborated with two other UT colleagues (Thomas McGarity and Lynn Blais) on a U.S. EPA-funded project identifying the problems associated with, and the legal authority available for regulating air toxins in the state of Texas. The Texas Council for Environmental Quality commissioned the project and plans to use the results in its regulation writing and legislative activities. Professor Wagner also published a book with colleague McGarity in 2008 entitled Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research (Harvard University Press), and they also produced a report for the Wilson Center for International Scholars on the types of legal challenges that can be filed against EPA's environmental models and their past success in court.

Professor Wagner began her legal career in 1987. From 1987-88, she served as a law clerk for the Honorable Albert Engel, the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Professor Wagner then served as an Honors Attorney at the Environmental Enforcement Section of the Environment Division at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. While an attorney at DOJ, Professor Wagner was the first or second chair on a number of prominent cases, including U.S. v. Vertac, a large Superfund case, and U.S. v. City of Seattle, one of the first natural resource damage cases brought by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Superfund law. Wagner then moved to the General Counsel Office of the Department of Agriculture in 1991 where she served as the Pollution Control Coordinator and established a central office, with six satellite legal offices, to manage and advise DOA agencies on compliance under the pollution control laws. Professor Wagner began her academic career in 1992 as an assistant professor at the CWRU School of Law.

Professor Wagner has published widely in the areas of law and science, and presented a number of papers in a wide variety of academic and practice-based settings.

Professor Wagner is also trained as an ecologist. After majoring in biology at Hanover College (graduating summa cum laude), she received a masters degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and began (but did not finish) a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Virginia School of Environmental Science. Throughout this period (1979 through 1984 and the fall of 1988), Wagner's research focused primarily on the ecology of benthic diatoms in wetland systems. She conducted research and coursework on diatoms at summer research institutes at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan Research Station in Pellston Michigan; and the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Okoboji, Iowa.

Wendy Wagner
University of Texas School of Law
Austin, TX 78705
512.232.1477
email
website