Richard L. Revesz

Courses

• Administrative Law

  The course will study the legal regime affecting the operation of administrative agencies – both agencies in the Executive Branch and “independent” agencies. It will analyze the position of agencies on our constitutional scheme of separation of powers, the mechanisms by which Congress and the President exercise control over administrative action, constraints on the exercise of administrative discretion, the internal structures of agencies, the role judicial review, the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act concerning rulemaking and adjudication, due process rights before administrative agencies, and doctrines of standing, ripeness, and reviewability, as they apply to challenges to agency action. As most traditional administrative law courses, an important focus will be the tradeoff between narrowly constraining an agency’s discretion, so that it can respond creatively to vexing social problems. Another focus will be the consideration of competing substantive rationales for regulation, such as the existence of natural monopolies and the presence of externalities. The course will discuss the relationship between various forms of substantive regulation and the procedures that govern such regulatory activity.

• Advanced Environmental Law Seminar

  Course will examine cutting-edge issues in environmental and land use law, including current steps and proposals to reform U.S. law and developments in international environmental law, including climate change and GMOs. Leading outside government and academic speakers will, from time to time, present papers on current topics.

• Environmental Law

  The course offers an introduction to the legal regulation of environmental quality. The first part of the course considers the theoretical foundations of environmental regulation, including economic and non-economic perspectives on environmental degradation; the scientific predicate for environmental regulation; the objectives of environmental regulation; the valuation of environmental benefits; the distributional consequences of environmental policy; and the choice of regulatory tools, such as command-and-control regulation, taxes, marketable permit schemes, liability rules, and informational requirements. The second part analyzes the political dimensions of environmental law, including the role of the various institutional actors, the allocation of regulatory authority in a federal system, and public choice explanations for environmental regulation. The third, and major part of the course analyzes the principal environmental statutes, particularly the Clean Air Act (and its use to regulate greenhouse gases), the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (the Superfund statute), and the National Environmental Protection Act.

• Regulatory Policy Clinic

  Please see the All Clinical website for complete information about this course.