Lisa Heinzerling

Lisa Heinzerling is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and a former Member Scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Professor Heinzerling has taught and written in the areas of Environmental Law, Risk Regulation, Natural Resources Law, Administrative Law, Food and Drug Law, and Torts for 15 years.

Professor Heinzerling has served as counsel in several cases concerning the scope or constitutionality of important programs and procedures relating to health, safety, and environmental protection. She was the principal author of the winning briefs for Massachusetts and other petitioners in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Court held that EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. She also served as counsel of record in the U.S. Supreme Court for Massachusetts and New Jersey in Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., in which the Court rejected a lower court's decision holding the central program of the federal Clean Air Act unconstitutional. Professor Heinzerling has also testified on regulatory reform and other matters in Congress, and she has participated as a peer reviewer of OMB's annual report on costs and benefits of federal regulation (in 2001) and of EPA's report on assessing the benefits of safe drinking water regulations (in 2000). On numerous occasions, Professor Heinzerling has advised public interest organizations on legal strategy in litigation and agency rulemakings involving health, safety, and environmental protection.

Professor Heinzerling has worked in all three branches of government; at the federal level, she has worked for the judiciary and for Congress, and at the state level, she has worked for the executive branch. She began her legal career as a law clerk, first for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., on the United States Supreme Court. Heinzerling also served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Protection Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office. Just after coming to Georgetown, she served as Special Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning the nomination hearings of Stephen Breyer. In between serving as a law clerk and as an Assistant Attorney General, Heinzerling practiced fair housing law for a small public interest firm in Chicago, as one of the first class of Skadden public interest fellows. In addition to teaching at Georgetown, Heinzerling has also taught as a visiting professor at the Harvard and Yale law schools.

Professor Heinzerling has published widely in the fields of environmental law and regulatory policy. In more than 30 law review articles and three books, she has made the case for protective health, safety, and environmental standards by emphasizing the multiple values promoted by such standards, including human life and health, nonhuman species, freedom, fairness, and community. In doing so, she has also criticized economic analysis of health, safety, and environmental regulation for its reductive focus on human life as the only value promoted by regulation and for its use of valuation techniques (such as translating lives and health into dollars) that distort and confuse public debate over regulation. In four of the past ten years, articles by Professor Heinzerling have been chosen by peers in the field as among the ten best environmental and land use articles of the year.

Lisa Heinzerling
Georgetown University Law Center
Washington, DC
202.662.9115
email
website