For Immediate Release
April 19, 2011

Media Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9037

Lisa Heinzerling

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A highly regarded scholar and policy leader in the field of environmental law, Georgetown University Law Center Professor Lisa Heinzerling was selected as the first recipient of the New Directions in Environmental Law Award by the Yale Environmental Law Association and the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. She received the honor at the New Directions in Environmental Law conference at Yale Law School on April 2.

"Lisa Heinzerling perfectly embodies the spirit of this award," said Yale Law student Stephanie Safdi, conference chair and co-president of the Yale Environmental Law Association. "Her creative, value-laden, and capacious scholarship pushes us to interrogate and rethink traditional doctrine and practices and imagine new directions."

The New Directions in Environmental Law Award recognizes individuals who are "actively, creatively and ethically opening up new directions in the field of environmental law."

Heinzerling received an A.B. from Princeton University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review. She clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Before coming to Georgetown in 1993, she served as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, specializing in environmental law. She is the co-author of Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing (New Press, 2004) and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Yale Law School.

Heinzerling served as associate administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Policy in 2009 and 2010. In 2007, she was lead author of the petitioners’ briefs in the case Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA did have authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

 

About Georgetown University Law Center 

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's premier law schools. It is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law, and the faculty is among the largest in the nation. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body representing more than 60 countries.