Michael Vandenbergh, David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law and director of Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt University, has been elected a fellow of the American College of Environmental Lawyers, a professional association of lawyers and scholars who practice and study environmental law.
The new class of fellows was elected in July 2018 and inducted into the ACOEL at its annual meeting in October. ACOEL was organized in 2007, and membership is by invitation. Vandenbergh is one of 24 members invited to join ACOEL’s Class of 2018. He joins J.B. Ruhl, who also holds a David Danels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law, as one of two Vanderbilt professors who are ACOEL members.
Vandenbergh is a leading scholar of environmental and energy law who has taught at Vanderbilt Law School since 2001. He was named a Daniel Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair of Law in 2013. Before joining the legal academy, Vandenbergh practiced at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C., and served as Chief of Staff of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993 to 1995. He earned his J.D. at the University of Virginia School of Law as an Armour Scholar in 1987 after earning his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a John Motley Morehead Scholar. Allen Gates ’72, a partner with Mitchell Williams in LIttle Rock, Arkansas, was installed as ACOEL’s president in October 2018.
Vandenbergh is the co-author, with Jonathan Gilligan, of Beyond Politics, published in 2017 by the Cambridge University Press. The book provides a roadmap for private-sector action to reduce the risks of climate change.
At Vanderbilt, Vandenbergh teaches courses in public environmental law and policy and private environmental regulation as well as Property Law and Climate Change Justice. He is a faculty advisor to the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review, a compendium of the best scholarship in environmental law and policy published during the previous academic year.