Gregg Macey Joins UCI Law Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources
IRVINE, Calif. (Oct. 7, 2021) — The University of California, Irvine School of Law (UCI Law) is pleased to announce that Gregg Macey has joined the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources (CLEANR) as Associate Director for Environmental Justice. He joins Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Faculty Director Alejandro Camacho, and Staff Director and Attorney Melissa Kelly, in leading the center.
Macey will spearhead the center’s growing research and outreach efforts to promote environmental and climate justice, locally and around the world. His research appears in a number of journals, including Environmental Science and Technology, Georgetown Law Journal, Environmental Health, Utah Law Review, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell Law Review and Environmental Management, among others. He published book chapters in Risk Analysis of Natural Hazards (2016) and Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (2019). He co-edited a volume on the future of the Superfund program, Reclaiming the Land, with Jon Cannon. He taught at Brooklyn Law School, Boston University, MIT, Fordham Law School and the University of Virginia. Prior to academia, he was an associate with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, a senior associate with E2 Inc., an environmental consulting firm and a senior associate with the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), a land use mediation firm. Macey holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in urban planning from MIT.
“We are fortunate to have Gregg’s leadership and look forward to carrying out pathbreaking research and implementing new environmental programs together through CLEANR,” said Professor Camacho.
“I am thrilled to join the center at UCI Law,” said Macey. “UCI is a special place, with deep knowledge in environmental law, planning, and policy, as well as cutting-edge labs and faculty in fields such as informatics, anthropology, earth system science, history and medicine. Their collective work is of critical importance to frontline communities. There is a strong interest at this university in answering questions that the environmental justice movement framed and advanced for decades, and to do so in ways that promote research justice and ownership.”
Macey is forming programs that tap into the university’s mandate, dating back to its founding, to promote interdisciplinary research, incubate new ideas and advance social mobility.
“We’re going to focus attention on communities that face dual threats of extraction and climate change, unregulated spaces where people live and work, gaps in legal services and collective trauma that the state ignores when it tries to map, measure or manage them,” Macey continued.
The mission of CLEANR is to promote innovative research and catalyze concrete policy action in environmental and land use law. Through interdisciplinary research, education, dialogue, and public programming, CLEANR facilitates engagement with environmental issues among policymakers, practitioners, community leaders, scientists, scholars and students. Building advocacy networks and promoting knowledge within and beyond the field, the center strives to advance law and policy on intractable environmental problems both locally and globally.
About the University of California, Irvine School of Law
The University of California, Irvine School of Law is a visionary law school that provides an innovative and comprehensive curriculum, prioritizes public service and demonstrates a commitment to diversity within the legal profession. UCI Law students have completed more than 123,000 hours of pro bono work since 2009. Forty-seven percent of UCI Law’s J.D. graduates are people of color. At UCI Law, we are driven to improve our local, national and global communities by grappling with important issues as scholars, as practitioners and as teachers who are preparing the next generation of leaders. The collaborative and interdisciplinary community at UCI Law includes extraordinary students, world-renowned faculty, dedicated staff, engaged alumni and enthusiastic supporters. More information on UCI Law is available here. Please follow UCI Law on Twitter @UCILaw and Facebook @UCIrvineLaw. Follow UCI Environmental Law on Twitter @UCIEnviroLaw.
Media Contact:
Colleen Taricani
Assistant Dean for Communications
ctaricani@law.uci.edu