“You can always tell an environmental law professor’s office because right next to their desk on the wall, there’s a dent,” Professor Richard Lazarus tells me, half jokingly.  “I’ve been hitting my head against that wall for about the past 30 years.”

In the past decade, Lazarus has been frustrated with, “see[ing] us stumbling so poorly on climate.” He worries that we won’t be able to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. Why? He explains, we lost four years during the Trump Administration. President Trump rolled back, revoked, or reversed over one-hundred environmental rules. Will environmental law recover? Will the courts be able to help us after President Trump gave the Supreme Court a conservative majority? These concerns preoccupy Lazarus.

It hasn’t always been this frustrating. Looking back on how he got into the field, Lazarus reflects on his roots. Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, he graduated from high school young and enrolled in college at the age of 16. At the time, Lazarus notes, he still looked like he was 12 years old. After trying to take classes, Lazarus dropped out. He realized he needed to grow up some more and find something, as he put it, “that made [his] heart go pitter-patter”. 

After traveling Europe with other teenagers and finding more of himself, he re-enrolled at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign. Lazarus decided to get a B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in economics. For him, a defining moment was when he knocked on his advisor’s door and told him his plan. Instead of turning away, the professor took him seriously. He said “okay, how are you going to do that?” Lazarus remembers. Lazarus never looked back. 

While studying chemistry and economics, Lazarus worked hard, even spending a semester at MIT. After graduating, he was admitted into Harvard Law School. Yet, he keeps his roots close. Lazarus proudly asserts, “I think people in the Midwest have less swagger.” He notes, “I knew all sorts of really talented, wonderful people who didn’t end up at Harvard Law School and this and that. And that’s just because of the quirks of life.” So, he built a career centered around how to best enact distributive and transitional justice in environmental law. 

Currently, Lazarus is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Over his career, he has provided written briefs to the Supreme Court forty times and has made oral arguments in 14 of those cases. Clients in these cases have included state and local governments and environmental groups. Moreover, Lazarus was the principal author of the Report to the President and National Commission on the BP Deep Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission. Following the 2020 Presidential Election, Lazarus was appointed to lead the incoming Biden administration’s Transition Team for the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Despite the success of his personal career, he is still disappointed with the state of environmental law. In his first edition of The Making of Environmental Law, published in 2004, Lazarus remembers his optimism. He is now feeling frustrated with “underestimat[ing] how much, among other things, the sort of wicked dimensions of climate change were going to cause upheaval and ultimately disaster.” In his second edition of The Making of Environmental Law, published in 2023, Lazarus poses his theory of what happened since: “For three decades, we’ve been saying ‘train, train, train’ and we had a moment at the beginning of the Obama administration where we thought something was gonna happen.” At the time, it seemed Democrats and Republicans were ready to take action together. 

But Lazarus recalls “The here and now [of politics] just cratered us politically.” In 2010, Republicans gaining control of the House of Representatives cratered us. And, in 2016, President Trump was elected, directly placing a climate denier in the White House. As Lazarus put it, the trajectory of environmental law has become a “trainwreck.”

When asked about the future, Lazarus says that “the courts aren’t going to save us.” While the courts have advanced environmental issues in cases such as Massachusetts vs. EPA, Lazarus doesn’t believe that there is any substitute for elected officials making change. 

While reflecting on his career, Lazarus is happy to have helped the next future of lawyers. He notes, “Oh, legacy? And that’s easy. It’s teaching.” While Lazarus notes that the Supreme Court arguments and working with the Biden/Harris transition team have been great fun, he loves his students. In fact, he “gets a huge kick out of them.” And, while there is a lot of work to be done, Lazarus remains hopeful. At the end of our interview, Lazarus posits, “you know who they are gonna listen to?” He points to me, the next generation of environmental advocates.