President Barack Obama has made the issues of climate change and cleaning up the environment a priority for his administration — and that administration is off to a good start. In January, Professor Lisa Heinzerling was named senior climate counsel to the administrator of the EPA, advising Administrator Lisa Jackson on the challenging issue of climate change. Heinzerling also served on the transition team for the EPA.

“Lisa’s a wonderful addition to a strong EPA climate and air team at both the political and career levels; her keen intellect and knowledge of the Clean Air Act will serve the agency well,” says Vicki Arroyo (L’94), the executive director of Georgetown Law’s State-Federal Climate Resource Center and a visiting professor who has also worked at the EPA. “Lisa’s already so well regarded as a teacher here; just imagine how her students will benefit when she returns from her experience crafting policy at this level!”

Heinzerling, who joined the Georgetown Law faculty in 1993, helped score an historic win for the environment in 2007 when she served as the primary author of the plaintiffs’ briefs for Massachusetts v. EPA. This was the landmark environmental law case where the Court held that the agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“EPA has been struggling for the past several years on how to fulfill that obligation [of Massachusetts v. EPA ],” Carbon Control News, a newsletter and Web site on the regulation and control of greenhouse gases, reported in January. “Heinzerling’s presence at EPA could help the agency craft climate change policies and potential regulations that conform with the high court ruling and can withstand future legal challenges.”

Heinzerling practiced environmental law in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office for three years early in her career, after graduating from the University of Chicago Law School and completing clerkships with Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court. At Georgetown Law, she has taught classes in environmental law, natural resources law, torts, government processes and the regulatory and administrative state.

Heinzerling’s book Priceless, On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, which she co-authored in 2004 with Frank Ackerman (an economist at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University), criticizes a cost-benefit analysis approach to environmental and health issues.

“Lisa combines a full grasp of the policy potential for addressing climate change through EPA action, sharpened by her leadership in winning Massachusetts v. EPA in the Supreme Court, with a broad theoretical conception of environmental welfare, reflected in her superb scholarship,” says Professor Peter Byrne, the faculty director of the State-Federal Climate Resource Center.

“Her interests are wide-ranging; she’s a thoughtful scholar on government processes, regulation, cost-benefit analysis; she appreciates the role of science and policy making and she wrote the winning brief in Massachusetts v. EPA,” says Aleinikoff. “All of those things make her a top candidate for the role.”

Neal Katyal definitely knows the ins and outs of a good Supreme Court argument. Though he’d argued just two cases before the Court prior to January 21, 2009, he mooted one of those cases 15 times before the real deal. The date of that argument was March 28, 2006; the case was Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Katyal was challenging the military commissions then set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay. It was Katyal’s first appearance before the nine justices; it was the solicitor general’s 34th, and it was Katyal who emerged on the winning side. The outcome was one for the history books, hailed by former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger as “simply the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law ever. Ever.”

Now, less than three years after taking on the S.G. in Hamdan, Katyal has joined a very different Justice Department, serving as principal deputy solicitor general. Katyal was sworn in January 21.

He’s had some experience around high profile cases. He served as co-counsel for then Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Supreme Court election case of Bush v. Palm Beach Canvassing Board and was lead counsel last year on a petition for rehearing in Kennedy v. Louisiana — the 2008 case where the Supreme Court held 5-4 that a state could not constitutionally use the death penalty to punish a defendant for the rape of a child. Katyal has also served as lead counsel for several amicus groups with cases before the Court.

“He is a thinker, a writer, and a strategist — in short, a great lawyer and thoughtful academic,” says Professor Viet Dinh, who worked with Katyal as co-counsel on the Kennedy v. Louisiana petition. “The president and the country are fortunate to have him occupy such an important role.”

Katyal, who last year became the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law and director of the Center on National Security and the Law, completed clerkships with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit after graduating from Yale Law School in 1995. He even has prior experience at Justice; he went on leave shortly after joining the Law Center faculty in 1997 to serve as a special assistant to the deputy attorney general for one year and as national security adviser to the deputy attorney general for a year after that. It was a career move, he has said, that would have been a lot harder had he been teaching anywhere else but Georgetown.

“That kind of natural in and out of administrations is something really unique about the place,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Our students are being taught by people who have had some experience with the way the law works on the ground, as opposed to the way it works in some book.”

And Katyal is doing his best to keep it that way. He spent a few hectic days in January rescheduling his criminal law class, which he has continued to teach even with the demands of his new job.

“His ability to grasp both the big picture points and the minute details — in criminal law, national security law and constitutional law — is unparalleled,” says David Koplow, one of the professors affiliated with the Center on National Security and the Law. “At DOJ, he will be, as he has always been here, a most energetic, insightful and effective activist.”

Professor Martin Lederman joined the Law Center as a full-time professor just last fall, after serving as a visiting professor for three years. Already, he’s made an indelible mark. Whether teaching a roomful of law students the intricacies of constitutional law, separation of powers and executive branch lawyering; discussing the government’s post-9/11 torture policies with writers Jane Mayer and Philippe Sands; or dissecting the First Amendment in a Supreme Court preview, Lederman has been extremely busy in the short amount of time he’s spent at Georgetown Law — and that’s when he’s not on a computer, opining on everything from war powers and torture to international law and treaties on sites such as “Scotusblog” and “Balkinization.” Now, he takes up the post of deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, having been appointed to the job in January.

It’s a return to duty for Lederman, who served as an attorney adviser in the OLC from 1994 to 2002. The years that followed his departure were controversial ones for that office, owing to the “torture memos” issuing from Bush administration lawyers authorizing harsh interrogation techniques in the war on terror. Lederman, who was back in private practice at the time, did not remain silent on the sidelines.

One of the memos “effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees,” Lederman wrote on the “Balkinization” blog last year. “It is, in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib and the other abuses within the armed forces in 2003 and early 2004.”

Many bloggers hearing the news welcomed Lederman’s new role. “If you need proof that things are different — very different — today, there’s this,” one wrote on Inauguration Day. A professor from another Washington, D.C., law school wrote, “The blogosphere’s loss will be the administration’s gain.”

Dean Alex Aleinikoff calls Lederman “universally respected” in the Georgetown, national and international communities. “I think it’s fair to say he is the most respected scholar and lawyer on very difficult issues regarding national security, presidential power, and international law,” says Aleinikoff. “He is a lawyer’s lawyer, just by his technical expertise and wide-ranging knowledge.”

Both Aleinikoff and Professor David Luban point to Lederman’s excellent recent scholarship — a massive two-part article, co-authored with Harvard Professor David Barron and published in the Harvard Law Review in early 2008 — that examines Congress’s authority to regulate the commander in chief ’s conduct of war.

“As a scholar, his paper on the powers of the commander in chief sets the gold standard and will be the indispensable starting point for everything written about it in the future,” Luban says. “To have Marty in the Office of Legal Counsel making the crucial legal calls instead of analyzing other people’s calls is great news for the country. It’s one place where, quite literally, President Obama could not have picked a better person for the job.”

Daniel Tarullo (C’73) doesn’t shrink from a challenge. After being appointed by then President-elect Obama and confirmed by the Senate — by a vote of 96 to 1 — to be the newest member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, this Georgetown alum and law professor began the monumental task of helping get the nation’s economy back on track. Tarullo, who also served as Obama’s senior economic adviser during his political campaign, was sworn in to his new post on January 28.

Serving on the seven-member board of the nation’s central bank likely comes as naturally as breathing to Tarullo. He was former President Bill Clinton’s chief adviser on international economic policy from 1996 to 1998, coming to the role from previous jobs as assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs and deputy assistant to the president for economic policy (1993-1996). From 1995 to 1998, Tarullo also served as Clinton’s personal representative to the G7/G8 group of industrialized nations. He’s worked in the Commerce and Justice Departments, served as chief counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on the Senate Labor and Human Rights Committee and taught at Harvard Law School in addition to Georgetown Law.

Newsweek ’s Michael Hirsh noted in December that Tarullo may be the most important member of Obama’s economic team. “Those who’ve worked with the soft-spoken Tarullo say he brings the right blend of save-the-world zeal and balanced judgment,” he wrote.

Tarullo’s Georgetown Law colleagues couldn’t agree more. “Dan Tarullo is a force of nature,” says Professor William Bratton. “He is an astute observer of people and events whose opinions and insights have taught me volumes of things I need to know. … He believes that regulation can improve our lives and wants to make it work.”

Tarullo’s recent book Banking on Basel: The Future of International Economic Regulation (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2008) couldn’t be more timely. In the book, Tarullo notes that the subprime mortgage crisis that began in 2007 “revealed massive failures of risk management by financial institutions and of supervision by government authorities” and explores the effect of the 2004 international banking regulation standards known as Basel II.

At the Law Center, Tarullo has taught courses including Transnational Law, Banking and Financial Institutions Regulation, and Foreign Investments Law and Policy.

“As a law professor, Dan Tarullo is extraordinary in his ability to combine the latest theory with lots of real world experience and wise policy proposals,” says Professor Barry Carter. “He is popular in the classroom, and he actively shares his ideas with his faculty colleagues as well as his students.”