Josh Galperin joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 2018. Prior to coming to Pitt Josh was the Director of the Environmental Protection Clinic, Lecturer in Law, and a Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Josh was also a lecturer and the Environmental Law and Policy Program Director at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES). In addition to directing and teaching the Environmental Protection Clinic, Josh directed the dual law-environment degree program between F&ES and Pace, Vermont, and Yale law schools. He was a lead collaborator in the Land Use Collaborative. Josh was also the associate director for the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy where he oversaw all operations of the Center including budgeting, fundraising, research, and teaching.

Josh’s research and teaching cover environmental law, administrative law, food and agriculture law and policy, property, constitutional law, and tort law. He has published extensively on environmental law, with particular emphasis on the role of non-governmental advocates in the creation and maintenance of environmental law, takings and just compensation, invasive species policy, and private environmental governance. His research in administrative law looks at constitutional democracy and administrative legitimacy. He has also written about food and agriculture law and policy, particularly where agriculture and food law intersect with environmental policy and administrative law doctrine. His work appears or is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Denver Law Review, Arkansas Law Review, Vermont Law Review, Fordham Urban Law Journal, George Washington Journal of Energy and Environmental Law, and elsewhere.

Before Yale, Josh worked for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) where he was a policy analyst and research attorney. In that position he established and managed SACE’s coal plant retirement campaign, which was a hybrid legal, grassroots, and analytical effort to catalyze retirement of the Southeast’s oldest, dirtiest, and least efficient coal plants. Before SACE, Josh was a legislative counsel for the Vermont General Assembly where he primarily staffed the House and Senate committees on agriculture. In that role he was involved with a number of bills that eventually became law including Vermont’s farm-to-plate investment program, dairy price stabilization, and creation of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council. Galperin studied law at Vermont Law School where he graduated magna cum laude and was a member of the Vermont Law Review’s senior editorial board. He earned a master’s degree in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a bachelor’s degree in political science with a minor in wildlife conservation from the University of Delaware.

You can follow Josh on Twitter @JoshGalperin. 

Selected Publications

• The Life of Administrative Democracy, 108 Georgetown Law Journal. (forthcoming 2020).

• Uncommon Law: Judging in the Anthropocene (with Douglas A. Kysar) in Climate Change Litigation in the Asia Pacific.(forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).

• Board Rooms and Jail Cells: Assessing NGO Approaches to Private Environmental Governance, 70 Ark. L. Rev. (2019).

• Pennsylvania Gas: Trusts, Takings and Judicial Temperaments. 4 Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, & Energy Journal 531. (2018).

• Value Hypocrisy and Policy Sincerity: A Food Law Case Study. 42 Vt. L. Rev. 345 (2018).

• Defining and Closing the Hydraulic Fracturing Governance Gap. 95 Denver L. Rev. 191. (2017) (with Grace Heusner and Alison Sloto).

• Eating is Not Political Action, 13 J. Food L. & Pol'y 113. (2017). (with Graham Downey and Lee Miller).

• Trust Me, I'm a Pragmatist: A Partially Pragmatic Critique of Pragmatic Activism. 42 Colum. J. Env. L. 425. (2017).

• Resilience and Raisins: Partial Takings and Coastal Climate Change Adaptation. 46 Env. L. Rep. 10123 (2016) (with Zaheer Hadi Tajani).. (2018).

• No Farms No Food?: A Response to Baylen Linnekin, 45 Fordham Urb. L. J. 1141 (2018).

• Foreword: Private, Environmental, Governance. 9 George Washington Journal of Energy & Environmental Law 1. (2018).

• Food Localization: Empowering Community Food Systems Through the Farm Bill,, 14 Journal of Food Law and Policy. (2018) (with Brian Fink and Alexandra Oakley Schuluntz)

• Raisins and Resilience: Elaborating Home's Compensation Analysis with an Eye to Coastal Climate Change Adaptation, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Vol. 35, No.3. (2016).

• Does the Compensation Clause Burden the Government or Benefit the Owner? The Compensation Clause as Process. 1. U. Balt. J. Land Dev. 27. (2011).

• A Warning to States--Accepting this Invitation May be Hazardous to Your Health (Safety, and Public Welfare): An Analysis of Post-Kelo Legislative Activity. 31 VT. L. REV 663. (2007).