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On December 12, LLM ’08, the director of ������ Law’s United Nations Diplomacy Clinic, stood at a lectern to face a panel of judges at the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. Over his gray suit, he wore an eye-catching accessory: a bright red necklace of dried pandanus fruit. The ula fala garland is traditionally worn by Samoan orators, and Rudyk was representing Samoa and 38 other members of the Alliance of Small Island States.

The hearings addressed the question: what obligations do countries responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions owe under international law to small island developing states at risk from a changing climate? Rudyk spoke about the dangers faced by such island states due to rising sea levels. “[They] have contributed negligibly to the causes of climate change, yet face some of the most severe impacts, including the potential loss of land territory and marine resources,” he told the court.

The court’s advisory opinion was still pending at press time. “This is the first time that the ICJ has dealt with a climate issue,” Rudyk says. “Its decision could have tremendous significance. Climate change and the potential disruption to states and the international order will be quite profound. And I think we need to think about how we can either reconceptualize or interpret international law to deal with this crisis.”

Rudyk is just one of the ������ Law faculty members who—along with a number of Law School centers and clinics—are engaging with urgent, emerging issues related to rising global temperatures. Climate change raises questions of environmental law and much more. , Wilf Family Professor of Property Law, has studied the efforts of local governments to control greenhouse gas emissions. Dean Emeritus , AnBryce Professor of Law, has championed the use of cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulation. , Robert C. Kopple Family Professor of Taxation, helped shape clean energy policy in the Biden administration. In his scholarship and clinical work, Professor examines the intersection of climate change and human rights. Research by centers such as the and the has shaped regulatory policy at the federal, state, and local levels.

Today, however, climate-related research and advocacy face new uncertainty as the Trump administration moves to upend broad swaths of federal regulatory policy related to the environment. “To what extent will the Trump administration—and the litigation that comes out from this administration—limit the ability to regulate climate change in the future?” asks Wyman. The question is real, not rhetorical. She and her colleagues will be watching closely.

The Law School’s centers are the locus for much environmental law work underway at ������ Law. While Policy Integrity’s mission is to improve government decision-making through research and recommendations, environmental and energy policy has been a particular focus since the center’s founding in 2008. “We started with five people and I thought it would stay at that level. Today, there are now 30 full-time employees, plus all the students who work with us,” says Revesz, Policy Integrity’s co-founder and faculty director. “It’s a big player in this ecosystem of think tanks that bring their expertise to bear on some of these important public policy programs.”

One example among many: the Rockefeller Family Fund sought to explore whether the 1980s-era federal law that created a framework for cleaning up hazardous waste sites—informally known as the Superfund Act—could be broadened to enact new penalties against polluters. Rachel Rothschild ’20, then a Policy Integrity research fellow, authored a 2022 memo that inspired the “climate superfund” laws of New York and Vermont, which seek to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate change–related damage. (At press time, the US Justice Department and two dozen states have filed lawsuits challenging the New York and Vermont laws.)

As the federal government moves to roll back an assortment of Biden-era environmental regulations, many experts have called for state and local jurisdictions to implement policy to address or adapt to climate change. Such local efforts—from the installation of green roofs in San Francisco to congestion pricing in New York City—are exactly what the Guarini Center has been studying for several years. The center has published research on best practices and potential outcomes for environmental reforms, such as methods for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from food consumption or evaluating whether low-income tenants would face increased rents if apartment buildings electrified heating systems.

“Cities will really end up having to do a lot more adapting to climate change. It’s about protecting their local environment,” says faculty director Wyman, citing projects like the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, which seeks to prevent flooding along the lower Manhattan shoreline. “On the other hand,” she cautions, “you can only expect so much from local governments because they often lack the expertise to develop and implement complicated policies.” Local Greens, a forthcoming book co-authored by Wyman and Danielle Spiegel-Feld ’10, examines the successes and failures of city governments in this area.

Climate change issues play a prominent role in many of the 20 environmental law-related courses and clinics at the Law School. Students in Rudyk’s UN Diplomacy Clinic do work in the UN missions of some of the island nations that Rudyk advises, for instance. In the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Clinic, taught by Rodríguez-Garavito, students have traveled to Bangladesh, the Ecuadorian Amazon region, Puerto Rico, and Brazil to work with populations affected by climate change.

Rodríguez-Garavito centers his work on the intersection of environmental law and the rights of Indigenous people. Viewing climate issues through the lens of human rights, he has also coined the phrase “more-than-human rights” to capture the idea that nonhuman natural entities such as animals, forests, and rivers are linked with humans in a planetary web of life and have interests of their own. “I feel strongly about the need to integrate care and protection for human communities with that for more-than-human beings and communities,” he says.

“In addition to contributing solid legal writing and research, I think it is important that students are trained in cultural competence and to learn how to engage meaningfully and skillfully with vulnerable communities and ecosystems,” Rodríguez-Garavito adds. “If we want to be serious about the protection of life on Earth, then we need to be serious about advancing the rights of Indigenous and local communities which have protected key ecosystems across the world and are particularly vulnerable to ecological emergencies such as climate change and biodiversity loss. That is why we work in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Ecuador, and Bangladesh, among other places, because those are some of the most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change.”

The Environmental Justice Initiative makes its debut at the Law School this fall. Launched by a grant from Marie and Paul Napoli and co-sponsored by the Guarini Center and the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, the EJ Initiative will train students to work with community-based organizations to address racial and economic disparities in environmental exposure.

“I very much want students to be involved in learning the skills of practicing law. What does it mean to select cases? And what are the factors you would use to select cases?” says EJ Initiative director Marianne Engelman-Lado. “And then what does it mean to be a community lawyer? At the heart of this lab is to think about environmental justice and climate change and then to work on behalf of communities in strategizing to address the linkage between race, color, national origin, disability, income, and issues such as exposure to pollution.”

Since January, the Trump administration has implemented a series of executive orders dismantling Biden-era climate initiatives—withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement and cutting staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, among other moves. In July, President Trump signed into law reconciliation legislation that repealed or scaled back tax incentives for clean energy that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, while establishing new tax subsidies for oil, natural gas, and coal.

As a former assistant secretary of tax policy at the US Department of Treasury, Batchelder played a key role in implementing the landmark IRA clean energy incentives. The Trump legislation will have “devastating effects” on progress in clean energy technology, she says. However, she adds, the IRA clean energy credits disproportionately benefit conservative-leaning states and districts, and many core aspects of the credits remain on the books, although narrowed.

“This creates the possibility of reinstating incentives for key zero-emissions technologies in a different, more bipartisan environment,” Batchelder says.

Revesz—who from 2023 to 2025 served as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the US Office of Management and Budget—believes that the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back Biden regulatory initiatives will have a limited impact in the short term. “Repealing regulations of any kind takes time and needs to follow a procedure known as notice-and-comment rule-making,” Revesz explains. “So [change is] not going to happen overnight.”

What worries Revesz is the long term. “Most of what they’re trying to do is actually illegal—which doesn’t mean that they won’t get to do it initially.” Such actions will be challenged with litigation, he predicts. “But in the meantime, there’s going to be enormous uncertainty,” Revesz adds. “And it’s going to make it harder for industry to actually make investments that are necessary. It might make some US firms less competitive with foreign competitors,” he says. “In that sense, a lot of harm is getting done.”

Rodríguez-Garavito says that scientists, grassroots leaders, and communities with whom he collaborates have felt the impact of ecological emergencies, given the failure of governments around the world to act: “Many of them are being affected by funding cuts and a sense that public and private action against global warming is stalling.… So we do whatever we can: jump on a Zoom call to develop joint responses, conduct fieldwork to understand the situation on the ground, and partner with them to offer evidence-based solutions to those emergencies,” he says.

Despite an unpredictable environment, Engelman-Lado sees opportunities to have a measurable impact through the EJ Initiative. Students can help represent community groups facing government funding cuts, for example. “You know, there’s the saying, ‘Freedom is a constant struggle.’ How do you move forward and take that next step?” she says. “I know that we can keep moving forward, even when the world feels very confusing.”

Wyman agrees. “One of the things I try to tell my students is, ‘Look, you can’t give up. But you also have to think about the long term,’” she says. “For a good 10 years now, we have been thinking about climate change in a particular way. But with everything that is happening at the federal level, honestly, for academics or people who have the bandwidth to think more long term, I think there’s an opportunity to rethink. Yes, you want to focus on defending things. But there’s also a chance to reimagine and think about the future in a more optimistic way.”

Climate Forecasts

These ������ Law alumni are among those helping shape the response to climate change. We asked them how they see the road ahead.

• “We’re at a moment of urgency that’s quite difficult to express in words. Earth’s climate system is at a breaking point. And that would have a set of effects that we can only partially predict, but that plainly pose civilizational risks that tend not to be fully recognized…. We need to redouble our efforts to build public awareness and will, to create the right environment for good climate policy at the very soonest possible moment.” Miranda Massie ’96 is the founding director of the Climate Museum, a nonprofit that uses the arts and cultural programming to invite the public into climate engagement and action.
• “We need to make sure that all the work we’re doing, whether it’s decarbonization work or whether it’s adaptation work, makes people’s lives better—[because] it creates public open space; it modernizes people’s buildings; it makes them more comfortable.” Kathleen Schmid ’07 is deputy executive director at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.
• “I think something as weighty as climate regulation requires buy-in from not only all three branches of the government—and most important, from the legislative branch—but also buy-in from every stakeholder in climate. The states have a big place in climate regulation. They have their own interests, their own industries, their own regional climate and environmental concerns. Climate doesn’t exist in a microcosm…. We have to balance the cost-benefit of how do we generate reliable power, while at the same time trying to balance out environmental considerations.” Mathura Sridharan ’18 is now solicitor general of Ohio. As deputy solicitor general in the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, she represented several states in a successful US Supreme Court challenge to a US Environmental Protection Agency plan to reduce interstate air pollution.
  
  9/5/25 This online story has been updated from its print version to reflect the new name of Environmental Justice Initiative, formerly the Environmental Justice Laboratory, and Mathura Sridharan's new title as Ohio solicitor general.