CPR Comments on EPA's 'Benefits-Busting' Rule

Catherine A. O'Neill is an Adjunct Law Faculty Member and Environmental Scholar at Lewis and Clark Law School. She is a former Habitat Policy Analyst for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and former Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. She is a former member of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Professor O'Neill has taught, lectured, and written in the areas of environmental justice, environmental law, natural resources law, and property. Her work considers questions of risk and justice in environmental policy, focusing in particular on issues of environmental justice for Native peoples.

Professor O'Neill has worked on issues of environmental justice with various tribes, advisory committees, and grassroots environmental justice groups. Professor O'Neill was recently a member of the technical advisory board for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community's four-year study, "Bioaccumulative Toxics in Native Shellfish." Professor O'Neill served as consultant to the Forest County Potawatomi Community on environmental justice issues raised by a proposed mine in nearby Crandon, Wisconsin. In the fall of 2002, the tribe successfully concluded its decades-long efforts by purchasing, together with the Sokaogon/Mole Lake Band of Chippewa , the land including the proposed mine and withdrawing the permit application. Professor O'Neill worked extensively with the Fish Consumption Workgroup of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, first as a member of and then as consultant to the Workgroup. The Workgroup's investigation and deliberation over the course of two years culminated in the publication of a major report, Fish Consumption and Environmental Justice, which was transmitted along with recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002. While on the faculty at the University of Arizona, Professor O'Neill worked with Tucson's Environmental Justice Action Group, assisting the group on environmental justice issues raised by an air quality permit for beryllium and other emissions and a cleanup of TCE contamination.

Following her graduation from law school at the University of Chicago, Professor O'Neill was named a Ford Foundation Graduate Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School. As a fellow, Professor O'Neill studied issues of international environment and development policy. She then worked for the Washington State Department of Ecology as an Air Quality Planner and Air Toxics Coordinator. Her work there included researching the applicability of market-based approaches to air toxics regulation. Prior to joining the faculty at Seattle University, Professor O'Neill taught at the University of Washington and the University of Arizona.

Professor O'Neill has published numerous articles in the areas of environmental justice and environmental policy. These articles have been excerpted in casebooks, anthologies, and other collections on a diverse array of topics including environmental risk, economics and equity, environmental justice, Indian Law, and International Law. Professor O’Neill’s work has twice been selected by her peers for recognition in the Land Use and Environmental Law Review’s ten best articles of the year: for an article on debt-for-nature swaps, co-authored with Cass R. Sunstein, and, most recently, for an article on risk avoidance, entitled No Mud Pies: Risk Avoidance as Risk Regulation.  She also co-authored a chapter entitled, “The Mathematics of Mercury,” in Reforming Regulatory Impact Analysis, Resources for the Future Press, 2009, and her experience with mercury-emitting chlor-alkili plants led to her testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection in 2009.

Professor O'Neill has served on the board of the Washington Wilderness Coalition and has served as a peer reviewer for various journals, including Environmental Management, and Risk Analysis.

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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
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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
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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. 

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202.747.0698 ext. 5
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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.