A pioneer in the field of environmental law, David Schoenbrod was at the forefront of environmental justice, taking on big business. Now, his concern has turned to Congress evading accountability to voters.

 

In addition to his position as a visiting scholar with American Enterprise, Professor Schoenbrod is a co-leader for "Breaking the Logjam: An Environmental Law for the 21st Century," a joint project of New York Law School and the NYU School of Law. He has frequently contributed to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other newspapers and periodicals. Professor Schoenbrod asserts in his scholarship that Congress has inappropriately shifted its responsibility for the laws to regulatory agencies and courts.

 

As staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) during the 1970s, he led the charge to get lead out of gasoline, dramatically helping to reduce the amount of the brain damaging contaminant in the air. After seven years with the NRDC, Professor Schoenbrod felt the need to write about the trends he had been finding in practice.

 

“Many of the environmental statutes that were supposed to be helping people were charades,” he says. “I found I enjoyed the give and take of the classroom, as well as the opportunity to write about the ideas that began to occur to me in practice.”

 

His widely-praised 1993 book, Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation, published by Yale University Press, was the genesis for the 1996 Congressional Review of Agency Rule Making Act. Also widely-praised is a second book, Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government, written together with his litigation partner at the Natural Resources Defense Council and present colleague at New York Law School, Professor Ross Sandler. In 2005, Yale released his new book, Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People. Professor Schoenbrod also coauthored Remedies: Public and Private (West, 2002), now in its fourth edition. He has also published articles in scholarly journals on environmental law, remedies, and the law and politics of regulation.

 

He began in law practice as director of program development at the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which had been established by Robert F. Kennedy.

 

At the NRDC, Professor Schoenbrod also served as codirector of the Council’s Project on Urban Transportation with Professor Sandler. They coauthored A New Direction in Transit, a plan to renovate the city’s subway system that was endorsed by all the city’s major newspaper editorial boards and ultimately adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

 

Professor Schoenbrod holds membership in the American Law Institute and the Education Advisory Committee, Common Good.

 

As a member of the American Tree Farm Association, Professor Schoenbrod has managed a woods at his country home in the Adirondacks.