Lisa Heinzerling

Lisa Heinzerling is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University. 

Professor Heinzerling's specialties include environmental and natural resources law, administrative law, the economics of regulation, and food and drug law. From January 2009 to July 2009, she served as Senior Climate Policy Counsel to the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and then, from July 2009 to December 2010, she served as Associate Administrator of EPA’s Office of Policy. In 2008, she served as a member of President Obama’s EPA transition team.

Heinzerling has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Vermont Law School, and Yale Law School. She lectures frequently on environmental law and other topics both in the U.S. and around the world. She has published several books, including a leading casebook (with Zygmunt Plater and others) on environmental law, a cutting-edge casebook (with Mark Tushnet) aimed at introducing first-year law students to the regulatory and administrative state, and a widely cited critique of the use of cost-benefit analysis in environmental policy (Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, co-authored with Frank Ackerman). Peer environmental law professors have four times voted her work among the top ten articles of the year. In 2002, she received the faculty teaching award at Georgetown Law. The Yale Environmental Law Association and Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy recently gave her their inaugural award for innovative and inspiring scholarship in environmental law.
After finishing law school, where she served as editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review, Professor Heinzerling clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a Skadden Fellow at Business & Professional People for the Public Interest, in Chicago, and for three years practiced environmental law in the Massachusetts Attorney General's office.

While at Georgetown, Professor Heinzerling has continued to litigate cases in environmental law. Most prominently, she served as lead author of the winning briefs in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. A 2009 survey of over 400 environmental lawyers and law professors ranked this case as the most significant case in all of environmental law.

Lisa Heinzerling
Georgetown University Law Center
Washington, DC
202.662.9115
email
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