Richard Revesz to Present Inaugural Alex Geisinger Lecture
ALI Director Emeritus Richard L. Revesz will be presenting the inaugural Alex Geisinger Lecture at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. Revesz will discuss “New Challenges for Federal Environmental Regulations – Executive Branch Responses.”
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Time: 5:00PM - Reception to Follow
Location:
Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Room 140
3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
The Alex Geisinger Lecture Series honors the memory of Professor Geisinger, a leading scholar of environmental law, administrative law, and public policy. Each year the law school will invite a leading scholar in one of these fields to give a talk to the Drexel community. Revesz is an apt inaugural speaker as he was a mentor of Geisinger's.
Richard L. Revesz, the AnBryce Professor of Law and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law, is one of the nation’s leading voices in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy. He has published ten books and around 80 articles in major law reviews and journals advocating for protective and rational climate change and environmental policies, and examining the institutional contexts in which regulatory policy is made.
Between January 2023 and January 2025, while on a public service leave, he served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is part of the White House Office of Management and Budget. In this role, he oversaw the promulgation of hundreds of significant regulations, including ambitious environmental and climate change regulations, improving their analytical grounding and resilience. He also supervised the first update in 20 years of Circular A-4, the primary guidance on how federal agencies analyze the consequences of regulations, and boosted everyday Americans’ participation in the federal regulatory process and reduced paperwork barriers to access to government benefits.
In 2008, Revesz founded the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank and advocacy organization with a full-time staff of 30, primarily lawyers and PhD economists, that promotes desirable climate change and environmental policies. Working closely with major environmental organizations, Policy Integrity has played an influential role before agencies and courts in ensuring that climate change environmental damages, particularly those affecting disadvantaged, vulnerable, and marginalized communities, are properly accounted for in regulatory proceedings. Between 2014 and 2023, Revesz was also 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.
Revesz was born in Argentina, learned English as a second language, and immigrated to the United States when he was 17. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received a law degree from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Following 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 Law faculty in 1985 and served as dean from 2002 to 2013.