Register here to attend the career chat (registration required for boxed lunch): Alumni Career Chat Registration
For information about Dr. Lazarus's public Alumni Lecture, visit: The Making of Environmental Law: The Challenge of Climate Change
Alumni Career Chats provide a unique opportunity to connect with Chemistry at Illinois alumni in an informal, interactive setting. Unlike a traditional lecture, Alumni Career Chats are more evenly divided between presentation and Q&A/conversation.
Prof. Richard Lazarus
Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
BS in Chemistry, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, '76
BALAS in Economics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ‘76
JD, Harvard Law School, '79
From Noyes Lab to Harvard Law School and the U.S. Supreme Court
Friday, March 29, 2024
12 pm
Noyes Laboratory 353
Boxed lunch provided (Registration required)
*This lecture is open to all graduate students and postdocs*
Abstract
A chemistry degree may seem like a peculiar way to jumpstart a career in environmental law, legal scholarship, and Supreme Court advocacy. But Noyes Lab proved for Richard Lazarus (BS, ’76) to be just such an effective launching pad. Now a chaired professor at Harvard Law School, Richard Lazarus chose to obtain a degree in chemistry precisely because of his interest in environmental law, and the training he received at Illinois has proved indispensable to the work he has done, whether as a legal academic, a Supreme Court advocate, or the Executive Director of President Obama’s Commission charged with investigating the root causes of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In this presentation, he will offer career advice rooted in his time at Illinois and will emphasize the extraordinary breadth of and far-flung and exciting career opportunities related to the study of chemistry.
Bio
Richard Lazarus is the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Supreme Court Advocacy, Environmental Law, Torts, and Climate Lawyering. His primary scholarship concerns Supreme Court decision making and environmental law. Professor Lazarus has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the United States Supreme Court in more than 40 cases and has presented oral argument in 14 of those cases. In 2020, Professor Lazarus published The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press 2020), which tells the inside story of the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s most famous environmental law case. In 2023, he published the second edition of The Making of Environmental Law (U. Chicago Press 2023), a history of U.S. environmental law. Professor Lazarus previously worked for the Solicitor General's Office (1986-89) at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was Assistant to the Solicitor General. Professor Lazarus graduated from Harvard Law School and has a B.S. from the University of Illinois in Chemistry and a B.A. in Economics.
