Professors Sarah Light and Michael Vandenbergh | Private Environmental Governance

Legal Tenzer: Casual Conversations on Noteworthy Legal Topics

In This Episode...

I speak with Professors Michael Vanderburgh and Sarah Light about their book, Private Environmental Governance.

About Our Guests...

Sarah E. Light is the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Professor and the Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at Wharton Business School. Professor Light’s research examines issues at the intersection of environmental law, corporate sustainability, and business innovation. Her articles have addressed the ways in which laws that structure corporations and the marketplace should be considered forms of environmental law; how private actions by business firms, such as the adoption of a private carbon fee, or lending and underwriting decisions by banks and insurance companies, can be forms of private environmental governance; and how to address concerns about greenwashing consistent with the First Amendment. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, among others.

Professor Light serves as Faculty Co-Director of Wharton’s Climate Center. Professor Light has repeatedly been awarded Wharton Teaching Excellence Awards in both the undergraduate and MBA divisions.

Michael Vandenbergh is the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law Director, and the Climate Change Research Network Co-Director, Energy, Environment and Land Use Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. He is an award-winning teacher and scholar whose research focuses on working with interdisciplinary teams to explore environmental governance, environmental behavior and climate change. His research has developed the concept of private environmental governance and explored how private governance initiatives can address polarization and other barriers to climate change mitigation. His interdisciplinary work with Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network focuses on the reduction of carbon emissions from the household sector, and he is one of the top 25 law professors in the US based on peer-reviewed literature citations. His book with physicist Jonathan Gilligan, Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was favorably reviewed in Science, Nature Climate Change and Legal Planet; won the 2018 Chancellor’s Award for Research; and was named by the Environmental Forum as one of the most important environmental policy books of the last 50 years. His article “Beyond Gridlock,” also co-authored with Gilligan, won the 2015 Morrison Prize for North America’s best sustainability article. Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty, Professor Vandenbergh was a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. He served as chief of staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 1993 to 1995. He began his career as a law clerk for Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Vandenburgh has received teaching awards at Vanderbilt and at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.