Keynote Speaker
The Honorable Gina McCarthy
Administrator
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Gina McCarthy is the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Appointed by President Obama in 2009 as the assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, McCarthy has been a leading advocate for common-sense strategies to protect public health and the environment. Previously, McCarthy served as the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. During her career, which spans more 30 years, she has worked at both the state and local levels on critical environmental issues and helped coordinate policies on economic growth, energy, transportation, and the environment.
McCarthy received a bachelor of arts in social anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a joint master of science in environmental health engineering and planning and policy from Tufts University. When she is not in D.C., McCarthy lives in the Greater Boston area with her husband and two dogs, just a short bike ride away from their three children, Daniel, Maggie and Julie.
Watch a recording of Administrator McCarthy's keynote address here.
Panelists and Moderators
Alicia Alvarez
Alicia Alvarez is a clinical professor of law and director of Michigan Law's Community and Economic Development Clinic; she specializes in issues affecting nonprofit and community-based organizations. Her area of interest is economic justice. She also has taught in the Michigan Clinical Law Program, focusing on employment law. Before coming to the Law School, she founded and directed the Community Development Clinic at DePaul University College of Law. She also has been a visiting professor at the University of Valencia (Spain) and the Boston College Law School, and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of El Salvador. Prof. Alvarez has consulted with clinics throughout Latin America. She received her BA, magna cum laude, from Loyola University of Chicago and her JD, cum laude, from Boston College Law School.
Rhonda Anderson
Rhonda Anderson is an environmental justice organizer with Sierra Club Detroit. She came of age in the city during the 1960s and remembers it all like yesterday: the assassinations, the Black Panthers, Vietnam, riots, and tanks rolling through her neighborhood. Since then, Anderson has worked for equal rights for all of Detroit's underserved populations. She believes that many Detroit youth show the effects of growing up in a toxic environment—a sad fact she's working to change by getting industrial sites cleaned up. "I've always fought, always struggled against a power that appears bigger than I am," Anderson said. "But I know I'm making a difference by organizing my community. People tell me so."
Mary Jane Angelo
Mary Jane Angelo is a professor of law and director of the Environmental and Land Use Law Program at the University of Florida. Prof. Angelo has published widely on environmental law topics including pesticides, endangered species, water, sustainable agriculture, GMOs, and the relationship between law and science. In 2013, she published two books: Food, Agriculture and Environmental Law (with Jason Czarnezki and William Eubanks, Environmental Law Institute Press) and The Law and Ecology of Pesticides and Pest Management (Ashgate Publishing). Previously, she was an attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., and with a state natural resources agency in Florida. She received her BS in biological sciences from Rutgers University and her MS in entomology and JD from U-F.
Adam Babich
Adam Babich is a professor of law and director of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University Law School. Before joining Tulane, Prof. Babich practiced environmental law with private firms and served as a government enforcement lawyer, an adjunct attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, and a judicial law clerk for the Colorado Supreme Court. He has taught at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, and the University of Denver. Prof. Babich received a BA in anthropology and German from Dickinson College and a JD from Yale Law School.
Tracy Bach
Tracy Bach is a professor of law at Vermont Law School. She teaches and publishes on health care and environmental health law, climate change, international environmental law and human rights, torts, and legal method. She has taught in China, France, Rwanda, and Russia. A 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar in Dakar, Senegal, her most recent work focuses on climate change, environmental health, and the implications of both for the developing world. Prof. Bach blogs about climate change and Africa at http://simmeringsenegal.wordpress.com/home/. She received a BA in history from Yale University and an MA in public affairs and a JD from the University of Minnesota.
Diana Bowman
Diana Bowman is an assistant professor at the Risk Science Center and the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Her research interests include regulation of new technologies; the influence of the law on road safety, public health, and health-care delivery; and coronial law. In 2013, Prof. Bowman was awarded the John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration. She earned a BSc in physiology, an LLB, and a PhD in law from Monash University in Australia.
Rebecca Bratspies
Rebecca Bratspies is a professor of law at the CUNY School of Law and the founding director of CUNY's Center for Urban Environmental Reform. She has published widely on regulatory policy, with a focus on environmental democracy, regulating new technologies, and corporate responsibility. Her recent scholarship explores questions of urban sustainability and the intersection of human rights and environmental regulation. She is a scholar with the Center for Progressive Reform and the Environmental Law Collective. As a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar, she spent a year seconded to the Republic of China (Taiwan) Environmental Protection Administration. She has taught at the University of Idaho, Michigan State University, and NYU. She holds a BA in biology from Wesleyan University and a JD, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania.
Gregg D. Crane
Gregg Crane is a professor in the University of Michigan's Department of English Language and Literature and is the director of the Program in the Environment. He has been teaching ENVIRON 377: History and Literature of the Rockies at Camp Davis since 2007. A specialist in American literary and intellectual history, his current research focuses on the importance of intuition to a collection of literary, philosophical, legal, and environmental writers. In a previous life, he practiced law in San Francisco and Seattle. His litigation experience included work on several major environmental cases in California and Washington. He received a BA from the College of William and Mary; an MA from the University of California, Los Angeles; a JD from the University of California Hastings College of the Law; and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Kristina Daugirdas
Kristina Daugirdas is an assistant professor of law at Michigan Law School. Her research currently focuses on international organizations from the perspective of both international and U.S. law. Her most recent article, which will be published in the American Journal of International Law, challenges the empirical foundations for the claim that international organizations undermine democracy by undermining national legislatures. A key example in the article involves successful efforts by Congress to make the World Bank's operations more sensitive to environmental concerns. An earlier article published in the Maryland Law Review evaluated constitutional challenges to legislation and regulations implementing international agreements including the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. The article earned an award from the American Constitution Society’s Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law. Before joining Michigan, Prof. Daugirdas was an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of State Office of the Legal Adviser and served as the attorney for the U.S. delegation to a conference of the parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. She holds an AB, with honors, from Brown University and a JD, magna cum laude, from the New York University School of Law.
Dana Dolinoy
Dana Dolinoy is the John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and leads the Environmental Epigenetics and Nutrition Laboratory, which investigates how nutritional and environmental factors interact with epigenetic gene regulation to shape health and disease. In 2011, Prof. Dolinoy received the Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award from the American Society for Nutrition and the Classic Paper of the Year Award from Environmental Health Perspectives. She holds a BA in environmental sciences and policy from Duke University, an MSc in environmental sciences and engineering from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a PhD in genetics and genomics and integrated toxicology from Duke University.
Lisa Goldman
Lisa Goldman is senior attorney and counsel at the Environmental Law Institute (ELI). She works on a broad array of domestic and international issues that include forestry and biodiversity in Liberia; artisanal gold mining in Nigeria; climate-change adaptation and biodiversity protection; environmental justice and community environmental enforcement; and constitutional environmental law. She has helped train environmental officials in Chile, Liberia, Laos, and the United States. Before joining ELI, Goldman spent two years working as a graduate fellow at the Institute for Public Representation, an environmental law clinic at Georgetown University, and clerked for the Honorable Robert J. Timlin, U.S. District Judge for the Central District of California. She received a BA in human biology from Stanford University, a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and an LLM from the Georgetown University Law Center.
Sara Rollet Gosman
Sara Gosman is a lecturer at Michigan Law School. Her research focuses on risk and uncertainty in the context of environmental law and natural resources law. She teaches courses on toxic substance regulation and toxic torts, environmental justice, oil and gas law, and Supreme Court environmental litigation. From 2007 to 2012, Gosman was a water resources attorney for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Prior to joining NWF, Gosman worked for the State of Michigan as an assistant attorney general in the environment, natural resources, and agriculture division of the Michigan Department of Attorney General. Gosman earned an AB with high honors from Princeton University and a JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School.
David E. Jacobs
David Jacobs is the director of research at the National Center for Healthy Housing. He previously served as the director of the Office of Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he was responsible for policy development, grants management, enforcement, public education and training, and research. He wrote the first federal interagency strategy on childhood lead poisoning prevention in the United States. He also conceived and won congressional support for the U.S. Healthy Homes initiative in 1999. Jacobs serves as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and a faculty associate at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He holds a BA in political science from Antioch College, a BS in environmental health from Oakland University, an MS in technology and science policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a PhD in environmental engineering from Kennedy Western University.
Susan E. Kegley
Susan Kegley is the principal and founder of the Pesticide Research Institute (PRI), an environmental consulting firm focusing on pollutant fate and transport; human and ecological exposure assessment and risk assessment; development of tools to assess relative risks for different pesticides; environmental monitoring (with a focus on air and water sampling); and analytical chemistry. Prior to founding PRI, Kegley was a senior scientist with Pesticide Action Network North America. She holds a BS in chemistry, summa cum laude, from the University of Richmond and a PhD in organometallic chemistry from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Alexandra B. Klass
Alexandra Klass is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She teaches and writes in the areas of environmental law, energy law, natural resources law, tort law, and property law. Her recent scholarly work addresses regulatory challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation's electric transmission grid, federal financial support for renewable energy development, eminent domain issues surrounding interstate transmission lines, and the legal issues associated with using carbon capture and sequestration technology to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. She is a coauthor of The Practice and Policy of Environmental Law (Foundation Press, second edition, 2010) and Energy Law and Policy (West, forthcoming 2014). Before teaching, she was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land-use litigation. She received her BA from the University of Michigan and her JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Jonathan Levine
Jonathan Levine is a professor of urban and regional planning in U-M's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. His research centers on the potential and rationales for policy reform in transportation and land use. His current work focuses on the transformation of the transportation and land-use planning paradigm from a mobility to an accessibility basis and includes a number of funded projects and a book in preparation jointly with his colleague, U-M Prof. Joe Grengs. He also is interested in the design of institutions for emerging transportation systems—which may be based in large measure on autonomous electric vehicles—to serve metropolitan-accessibility goals. Prof. Levin earned a BS, MCP, MS, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Marie Lynn Miranda
Marie Lynn Miranda is dean of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE). She also holds an appointment as a professor in SNRE and the Department of Pediatrics. She has devoted much of her professional career to research directed at improving the health status of disadvantaged populations, particularly children. She is the founding director of the Children's Environmental Health Initiative, a research, education, and outreach program committed to fostering environments where all children can prosper. Dean Miranda was previously a faculty member in the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Integrated Toxicology and Environmental Health Program, the Department of Pediatrics, and the Global Health Institute at Duke University. She holds a BA in mathematics and economics from Duke University and an MA and a PhD in economics from Harvard.
Thomas G. Neltner
Thomas Neltner is a chemical engineer and an attorney following an unusual path from chemical manufacturing to state government to public interest advocacy, with stints as an adjunct professor at Indiana University throughout many of those years. A common theme has been his focus on chemical safety whether in the workplace, environment, consumer products and, more recently, food additives. From 2005 to 2010, he was a pro bono litigator on a number of successful lawsuits challenging actions of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Neltner has a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a JD from Indiana University.
Hari M. Osofsky
Hari Osofsky is a professor of law, the 2013-2014 Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs, and the director of the Joint Degree Program in Law, Science & Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. She also is on the faculty of the Conservation Biology Graduate Program; an adjunct professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society; and a fellow with the Institute on the Environment. Prof. Osofsky’s interdisciplinary law and geography scholarship, which has been published by Cambridge University Press and in leading law and geography journals, focuses on governance and justice concerns related to energy and climate change. She received a BA and a JD from Yale and a PhD from the University of Oregon.
Wendy Collins Perdue
Wendy Collins Perdue is dean and professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law. Dean Perdue writes and speaks on issues concerning public health, land use, and the built environment, and also writes and teaches in the areas of civil procedure and conflict of laws. She served for nine years as vice-chair of the Montgomery County Planning Commission, a public agency that oversees the land use and transportation planning for this large suburban county and also manages the county’s 33,000 acres of parkland. Dean Perdue has a BA from Wellesley College and a JD from Duke Law School. She was a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center before becoming dean at the University of Richmond. Prior to that, she clerked for the Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy and practiced with the firm of Hogan & Hartson.
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt Plater is a professor of law at Boston College Law School. He teaches and writes in the fields of environmental law, property and land-use law, and administrative process, and is coordinator of Boston College Law School’s Land and Environmental Law Program. He has been a consultant on environmental and land-use law issues in Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nepal, and Japan, and has worked on national endangered species legislation and litigation in the United States—most notoriously, six years spent litigating the case of the endangered snail darter fish vs. TVA’s Tellico Dam in federal district court, the circuit court of appeals, and in the U.S. Supreme Court, and through extended administrative and congressional hearings. In 2010, he was a consultant and commentator for government staff and media coping with the BP Deepwater Horizon Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, initiating a national symposium on the disaster and, with 37 students, organizing a major Submission to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. He received an AB from Princeton University, a JD from Yale University, and an LLM and SJD from Michigan Law School.
Jedediah Purdy
Jedediah Purdy is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Virginia, and Tel Aviv law schools. He is the author of five books, most recently Losing Nature: Living in the Anthropocene, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He has written for the Yale Law Journal, The New York Times, and Democracy, and has often appeared on NPR. He teaches Constitutional Law and Legal Theory in addition to working in the environmental area. He is interested in how people imagine, shape, and live with the natural world. Prof. Purdy holds a BA in social studies, summa cum laude, from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School.
Pamela Shubat
Pamela Shubat is the supervisor of the Health Risk Assessment Unit in the Minnesota Department of Health. She has worked in the fields of toxicology, exposure science, and risk assessment for 30 years. Her work includes developing risk assessment methods for sensitive populations and life stages and using those methods to establish limits for contaminants in air and water, including contaminants of emerging concern. She has served on the EPA Children’s Health Protection Committee for six years as both a member and chair. She received a BS in biology from the University of Minnesota-Duluth, an MS in fisheries and wildlife from Oregon State University, and a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Arizona.
David M. Uhlmann
David Uhlmann is the Jeffrey F. Liss Professor from Practice and the director of Michigan Law's Environmental Law and Policy Program. His research and advocacy interests include criminal and civil enforcement of environmental laws, worker endangerment, and efforts to address global climate change. Since joining Michigan in 2007, Prof. Uhlmann has published articles in the Michigan Law Review, the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, the Maryland Law Review, the Utah Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law, the Environmental Law Forum, The New York Times, and the American Constitution Society's Issue Briefs series. He is leading the efforts of more than 100 Michigan Law students participating in the Michigan Environmental Crimes Project, which is the first comprehensive empirical study of criminal enforcement under U.S. pollution laws. Initial results from that research will be published in 2014 by the Harvard Environmental Law Review. Prior to joining the faculty, Prof. Uhlmann served for 17 years at the U.S. Department of Justice, the last seven as chief of the Environmental Crimes Section. He received a BA in history with high honors from Swarthmore College and a JD from Yale Law School.
Kathryn Lynch Underwood
Kathryn Underwood is a city planner with the Detroit City Council Policy Division. Her areas of expertise include land-use policy, urban food systems, zoning, and sustainable redevelopment policy. Her current work includes formulating urban agriculture codes and policies for the City of Detroit. Underwood helped to create the Detroit Food Security Policy, sits on the Detroit Food Policy Council, and is a member of the Michigan Association of Planning Food Systems Policy Planning Committee. She is a founding member of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, the Detroit Agriculture Network, and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. She was a presenter at the 1st Global Summit on Metropolitan Agriculture in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 2010 and has participated in U.S. study groups related to food systems in both The Netherlands and Italy. She most recently represented Slow Food USA as an International Congress Delegate at Terra Madre 2012 in Turin, Italy. Underwood holds BAs in political science and environmental studies from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and an MUP from Wayne State University.