Free Range with Mike Livermore

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Natalie Jacewicz, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Livermore and Jacewicz discuss here forthcoming paper, "Crafting a New Conservationism." In that paper, Jacewicz examines a fundamental tension in environmental law: the conflict between protecting ecological collectives like species and ecosystems, and safegu...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Adam Ortiz, the MidAtlantic regional administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency. The conversation begins with a discussion of the role of a regional administrator at EPA. Ortiz emphasizes the importance of federal agencies working with local and state governments due to the complexity of environmental issues. He also discuss...

This bonus episode is an impromptu roundtable discussion that was part of a working group at the Santa Fe Institute in February 2024 on biodiversity and the sustainable development goals. The Santa Fe Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems. It was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists, many affiliated with with the Los Alamos Nati...

Free Range is launching a Patreon page to continue the podcast. If would like to support the podcast, visit patreon.com/user?u=106202307. In this solo episode, host Mike Livermore discusses the career of Dick Stewart, a mentor who was a longtime faculty member at NYU Law who died this past year. Livermore describes two important political developments in the twenty years since he met Stewart: the...

In this episode of the Free Range Podcast, host Michael Livermore is joined by guest Cale Jaffe, director of the Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law. The conversation touches on several key issues in environmental scholarship and pedagogy. A theme of the conversation is the relationship between lawyers and communities in environmental dispu...

On this episode of the Free Range Podcast, host Mike Livermore has a conversation with literary scholar Nicholas Allen about his recent book "Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled". The discussion begins with an examination of the book's evocative title. Allen explains that the phrase “seatangled” comes from a scene in James Joyce's “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” where the char...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Lisa Robinson, a senior research scientist and the deputy director at the Center for Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Lisa is a leading expert in the use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate public policy. The conversation begins with a discussion of the use of cost-benefit analysis and its importance in policy making. R...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Leif Wenar, professor of philosophy at Stanford University and author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World. Wenar first delves into his argument that the “resource curse” arises when natural resource wealth correlates with authoritarianism, conflict, and corruption. He explains this results from internatio...

On this episode Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Lisa Heinzerling, an environmental law professor at Georgetown University and former Associate Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Policy during the Obama administration. The focus of the episode is centered around major Supreme Court decisions on environmental law over the past two decades. The two begin by...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Jess Locke, an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland. She studies Buddhism, Western psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy. Locke’s interest in Buddhism is both personal and scholarly. She has a longstanding contemplative practice, and when she began her PhD program in philosophy at Emory, her goal was to...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Lee Fennell, a law professor at the University of Chicago and author of Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life,. The conversation begins with a discussion of the role of aggregation in law. Fennell explains that in many other contexts, resources only provide value when they are combined into usable chunks. Property...

On this episode of Free Range Podcast, host Mike Livermore is joined by Sabeel Rahman, a professor at Cornell Law School with substantial public policy experience, including as president of the think tank Demos and as senior counselor and then later as the acting Administrator in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Biden administration. Rahman is also the author of the book “De...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental law at Berkeley and the co-director for the Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Diversity. Doremus has a interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Plant Physiology from Cornell in addition to her JD. For Doremus, one of the benefits of an interdisciplinary educational experience is th...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus. Lazarus is the author of the book “The Making of Environmental Law”, which is now out in its second edition. On of the key takeaways from Lazarus’ book is that environmental law is especially difficult because environmental science and economics collide with the lawmaking system. Ecosystems natur...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by UVA Law professors Quinn Curtis and Mitu Gulati, as well as UNC-Chapel Hill Law professor Mark Weidemaier, all experts in the regulation of financial markets, to discuss new paper, Green Bonds and Empty Promises. A wide range of institutions borrow within the bond market, including municipalities, corporations, and sovereign nations....

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman and University of Pennsylvania law professor Shelley Welton. Both guests are experts in regulatory policy and are co-authors of a new case book Networks, Platforms, and Utilities. Case books serve as the academic bedrock of law school classes. They are collections of seminal cases that facilit...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Jenny Kendler, the artist in residence with NRDC. Kendler is an artist and activist whose work focuses on climate change and biodiversity loss. The conversation begins with a discussion of one of Kendler’s ongoing works, Amber Archive. To draw attention to the anthropogenic loss of biodiversity, this piece represents an imagined futur...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore is joined by Danae Hernandez-Cortes, an economist and professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University who studies environmental justice and the distributional consequences of environmental policy. The conversation begins with a discussion of the new emphasis within environmental economics on environmental inequality, with research...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Paul Stephan, a comparative and international law expert at UVA Law and author of the new book, “The World Crisis and International Law: The Knowledge Economy and the Battle for the Future,” recently published by Cambridge University Press. Stephan defines the concept of a knowledge economy as the increasing reliance on conceptual wor...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Alex Wang, Professor of Law at UCLA, co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and expert on the law and politics of Chinese environmental governance. Beginning with Wang’s initial experience in environmental issues in China, the US, and the NGO community, he discusses the generational and globally for...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore is joined by Emma Marris, an award-winning environmental writer and author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-human World. (0:00-1:26) The two begin the discussion by analyzing how nature is defined and valued. Marris critiques the concept of nature; for her, there is no “unspoiled” nature free from human influence, and the idea is assoc...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Jed Stiglitz, a law professor at Cornell whose new book, The Reasoning State, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. The podcast begins with a conversation on the love-hate relationship between American society and agencies like the EPA. These agencies hold a lot of power and are called on to address many pressing socia...

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Alex Guerrero, a philosophy professor at Rutgers who writes in moral and political philosophy. Guerrero is a leading philosophical defender of the idea of lottocracy—the practice of choosing political leaders through lottery rather than elections. The podcast begins with Guerrero’s diagnosis of the failures of our current politics and...

On this episode of Free Range, Host Mike Livermore is joined by two University of Virginia Law students, Matt Disandro and Elizabeth Putfark, who have produced this explainer episode on the pros and cons of wood pellets as a replacement for fossil fuels. To make wood pellets, wood from trees is broken apart, heated to reduce moisture, converted to a fine powder, and compressed to form dense, short...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore is joined by Laura Candiotto, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pardubice in the Czech Republic. Candiotto’s recent paper, "Loving the Earth by Loving a Place," serves as the starting point for the conversation in today’s episode. Candiotto begins by highlighting how her understanding of loving nature differs from common usage. She argues...