The Making of Environmental Law

“The Making of Environmental Law” by Richard Lazarus, Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

This talk, based on Richard Lazarus’s recent book “The Making of Environmental Law” recounts the emergence and evolution of modern environmental law and its future challenges.

“The Making of Environmental Law” tells the fascinating and revealing story of how environmental law in the United States first emerged, why it has since evolved in the way that it has as well as its enormous successes, and what challenges it presently faces. That story underscores how the effort to fashion pollution control laws confronts special problems, both because of the nature of pollution itself and the known means of pollution control, and because of our nation’s varied processes for lawmaking and the ways those processes relate to important cultural norms. Many of these challenges relate to the varied, complex, and uncertain spatial and temporal dimensions of pollution itself, factors that resist simple redress. The dual and compelling problems of climate change and environmental injustice present today the hardest challenges of all.

Richard Lazarus is the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Supreme Court Advocacy, Environmental Law, Torts, and Climate Lawyering. His primary scholarship concerns Supreme Court decision making and environmental law. Professor Lazarus has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the United States Supreme Court in more than 40 cases and has presented oral argument in 14 of those cases. He previously served on the Georgetown University law faculty, where he was the Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Professor of Law, and the Founding Faculty of Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. The Supreme Court Institute’s signature program is its provision of rigorous practice moot court sessions to oral advocates before the Court in more than 90 percent of the cases. In 2020, Professor Lazarus published The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press 2020), which tells the inside story of the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s most famous environmental law case. In 2023, he published the second edition of The Making of Environmental Law (U. Chicago Press 2023), a history of U.S. environmental law. Professor Lazarus previously worked for the Solicitor General’s Office (1986-89) at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was Assistant to the Solicitor General. Professor Lazarus graduated from Harvard Law School and has a B.S. from the University of Illinois in Chemistry and a B.A. in Economics. His two sons both attended Middlebury: Sam, Class of 2009, and Jesse, Class of 2012.