2018 Visionary Scholar

“Congress and the Executive: Challenging the Anti-Regulatory Narrative”
Richard L. Revesz

Richard L. Revesz is the director of the American Law Institute and a law professor and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law. Revesz is one of the nation’s leading voices in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy. His work focuses on the use of cost-benefit analysis in administrative regulation, federalism and environmental regulation, design of liability regimes for environmental protection, and positive political economy analysis of environmental regulation. His book Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health (with Michael Livermore ’06, 2008) contends that the economic analysis of law can be used to support a more protective approach to environmental and health policy. In 2008, Revesz co-founded the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law to advocate for regulatory reform before courts, legislatures, and agencies, and to contribute original scholarly research in the environmental and health-and-safety areas. Revesz received a BS summa cum laude from Princeton University, an MS in civil engineering from MIT, and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After judicial clerkships with Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court, Revesz joined the NYU School of Law faculty in 1985 and served as dean from 2002 to 2013. Revesz is the director of the American Law Institute, the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States.