Making Climate History at the Supreme Court: A Book Talk with Richard Lazarus, Harvard Law

When the Supreme Court announced its ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA the decision was hailed as a landmark, leading the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants and making possible important environmental safeguards which the Trump administration sought to unravel, and which President Biden is now planning to restore. The case has been recognized as the most important environmental law decision made by the Supreme Court.

Join the UCLA School of Law's ACS and Federalist Society Student Chapters and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability for an UCLA Emmett Institute book talk, where we will welcome, Richard Lazarus, Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and author of The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court, to describe how accidents, infighting, luck, superb lawyering, and the arcane practices of the Supreme Court collided to produce a legal miracle. Cara Horowitz, Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Co-Executive Director of the Emmett Institute, will moderate the conversation.

The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court is now available for purchase at this link.

About the author:

Richard Lazarus is the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses on environmental law and Supreme Court decision-making. He has represented the government and environmental groups in forty Supreme Court cases and has presented oral argument in fourteen. For ten years he has been co-teaching, with Chief Justice John Roberts, a course on the history of the Supreme Court. Lazarus was the founding Director of the Supreme Court Institute, which prepares attorneys for oral argument in over 90 percent of the cases brought before the Supreme Court.