Judith A Layzer Author

Judith A. Layzer was professor of environmental policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until her death in 2015. She earned a Ph.D. in political science at MIT. After four years at Middlebury College in Vermont she returned to MIT, where she taught courses in science and politics in environmental policymaking, ecosystem-based management, food systems and the environment, urban sustainability, energy and environmental politics, and public policy. Layzer’s research focused on several aspects of U.S. environmental politics, including the roles of science, values, and storytelling in environmental politics, as well as on the effectiveness of different approaches to environmental planning and management. A recent project asked: Do urban sustainability initiatives significantly reduce cities’ ecological footprints? And which aspects of “green cities” are most effective at reducing cities’ environmental impacts? In addition to The Environmental Case, Layzer was the author of Natural Experiments: Ecosystem-Based Management and the Environment (2008) and Open for Business: Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (2012). Layzer was an athlete as well as a scholar. In addition to having finished five Boston marathons, she shared nine national championship titles and one world championship trophy with her teammates on Lady Godiva, formerly Boston’s premier women’s Ultimate Frisbee team. Judith A. Layzer 1961–2015 Sara R. Rinfret is professor at the University of Montana, where she serves as an Associate Dean of Public Administration and Policy, and directs the Master of Public Administration Program within the School of Law’s Baucus Institute. Her main areas of research are environmental regulations and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is interested in the interactions between agencies and interest groups during the stages of environmental rulemaking at the federal and state level and the role of gender in the public policy classroom. To date, her work has been published in Society and Natural Resources, Environmental Politics, Review of Policy Research, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, PS: Political Science and Politics, Public Administration Quarterly, and the Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy. She has coauthored The Lilliputians of Environmental Regulation: The Perspective of State Regulators, and U.S. Environmental Policy: A Practical Approach to Understanding Implementation (cowritten with Michelle Pautz) and Who Makes Environmental Policy. She serves on the Executive Council for NASPAA and was a Fulbright Specialist Program Scholar in public administration  with the University of Aarhus (Denmark) in 2016. She holds a PhD in political science from Northern Arizona University and a Master of Public Administration from the Ohio State University.