Never before in our lifetimes has the rule of law felt so tenuous. These are not normal times for a research and advocacy organization dedicated to “harnessing the power of law and public policy to create a responsive government, healthy environment and just society.” Many of the policy ideas that we have championed — for example, worker safety protections, a fair regulatory system, climate actions that address equity concerns — have been adopted in some form. And today, these policies, as well as the democratic institutions which enforce them, are under threat.
The Center for Progressive Reform was founded by five environmental and administrative law professors concerned about the rollback of federal environmental protections and committed to use their scholarship and public voice to speak out. That was 2002 and a different era. Today, we’re facing a governance crisis of constitutional proportions, yet our commitment to scholarship and public voice is unwavering.
To aid our efforts, we are pleased to welcome three outstanding legal scholars who have accepted our invitation to serve as Member Scholars. Our network of nearly seventy Member Scholars — drawn from prominent US universities — volunteer their time to support and provide independent policy research, advocacy, congressional testimony, legal insight and media efforts.
Our newest Member Scholars are:
Madison Condon has taught at Boston University School of Law since July 2020. She teaches Environmental Law, Corporations, and a seminar on climate risk and financial institutions, and is an expert on climate change, financial risk, and regulation. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in leading legal journals including the UC Davis Law Review, the Washington Law Review, and the Utah Law Review. Her research has been relied upon by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Labor in rulemakings, and in 2023, Professor Condon joined the United Nations Principles of Responsible Investment Academic Network Advisory Committee.
Professor Condon’s writing and commentary have been featured in popular media outlets including the New York Times, Bloomberg, NPR, Politico, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, and her scholarship has been included in collections of the best articles of the year for several fields, including environmental law, corporate law, and securities law. She was previously at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, where she participated in litigation against federal regulatory rollbacks. In addition to her JD from Harvard Law School, she has an MALD from Tufts University’s Fletcher School.
Justin Pidot holds the Ashby Lohse Chair in Water & Natural Resources at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, where he also co-directs the Environmental Law, Science and Policy Program. Professor Pidot’s teaching and scholarship focus on environmental and natural resources law, administrative law, and related fields. He is a co-author of Practicing Environmental Law, the first environmental law casebook to use a problems-based approach to the subject. His scholarship has appeared in leading general interest law reviews, including the Stanford Law Review, and specialty journals, including the Harvard Environmental Law Journal.
During the Biden administration, Professor Pidot served as General Counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a political appointment within the Executive Office of the President. He previously held a political appointment as the Deputy Solicitor for Land Resources at the Department of the Interior during the Obama administration and served as an appellate lawyer in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Pidot received his J.D. with distinction from the Stanford Law School.
Dr. Carlton Waterhouse is a Professor of Law and the founding director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Center at the Howard University School of Law. He is an international expert on environmental law and environmental justice, as well as reparations and redress for historic injustices. In 2021, he was appointed by President Joe Biden in the role of Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Dr. Waterhouse lectures globally on climate justice, reparations and reconciliation, and group-based inequality. He has testified on reparations before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and he was awarded a Fulbright research fellowship to examine race and police violence in Brazil. His views have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other media outlets. His forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press explores the historic and contemporary role of the United States Supreme Court in both maintaining and dismantling racial dominance. In addition to his J.D. from Howard Law School, Dr. Waterhouse has a Masters of Theological Studies and a Ph.D. in Social Ethics, both from Emory University.
We are grateful to these three scholars for their expertise and public commitment on behalf of the common good.
For media inquiries, please contact Brian Gumm, Communications Director at the Center for Progressive Reform (bgumm@progressivereform.org).
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Minor Sinclair | May 29, 2025
Never before in our lifetimes has the rule of law felt so tenuous. These are not normal times for a research and advocacy organization dedicated to “harnessing the power of law and public policy to create a responsive government, healthy environment and just society.” Many of the policy ideas that we have championed — for example, worker safety protections, a fair regulatory system, climate actions that address equity concerns — have been adopted in some form. And today, these policies, as well as the democratic institutions which enforce them, are under threat.
Federico Holm | May 27, 2025
Since our last update on May 19, we have seen some critical developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In addition to the relentless progression of some resolutions towards becoming law, the most troublesome was the decision in the Senate to vote on the CRA resolutions ending Clean Air Act waivers issued to California. As James Goodwin said in a recent blog post on the matter, this represents a clear example of Senate Republicans “failing to follow the rules that they agreed to — and doing so to advance their policy agenda without heed to the rule of law wreckage they leave in their wake."
James Goodwin | May 22, 2025
The disease of authoritarianism now afflicting our democracy spread to yet another of our governing institutions the night of May 21. Do not be fooled: The debate over Senate Republicans' misuse of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) is not “inside baseball” or wonky or even complicated. Rather, it’s a simple story of legislators failing to follow the rules that they agreed to — and doing so to advance their policy agenda without heed to the rule of law wreckage they leave in their wake.
Daniel Farber | May 20, 2025
President Donald Trump has taken some dramatic steps in the name of improving use of NEPA, the statute governing environmental reviews of projects. The goal is to speed up the permitting process and make it more efficient. The reality is that his efforts will create chaos and uncertainty, with the likely effect of slowing things down.
Federico Holm | May 19, 2025
Since our last update (May 12), we have seen some movement regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. The pace has remained high, with outlets like The Hill and Banking Dive reporting that President Trump has signed multiple resolutions into law. Oddly, no official sources (like the White House’s website or congress.gov) reflect these developments.
Federico Holm | May 12, 2025
Since our last update (May 6), we have seen some movement regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. The pace in the Senate remained high, and we have seen lawmakers try to maximize their output before the CRA cutoff date.
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 7, 2025
In two previous posts, we discussed the major findings of the Project 2025 tracker we created along with our partners at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to implement its recommendations over its first 100 days. We also began offering some insights into making sense of these findings and how to interpret them. The basic finding was that the administration has fulfilled more than a quarter of Project 2025’s recommended executive actions affecting domestic policy. This raises a natural follow-up question: Is that a lot? In this post, we continue to provide analytical tools for answering that question.
Federico Holm | May 6, 2025
Since our last update (April 28), we have seen some important developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In the past week, we have seen legislators take up new resolutions for a vote, address the controversial issue of the California Clean Air Act waivers, and send new resolutions to the president to be signed into law. Things seem to be accelerating in Congress (and especially in the Senate), as legislators are approaching the CRA cutoff date.
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 6, 2025
In the first part of this series, we introduced the major findings of the tracker we built with our colleagues at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s progress in implementing Project 2025’s comprehensive policy blueprint, Mandate for Leadership. Specifically, we found that over its first 100 days, the administration pursued or completed 28 percent of the more than 530 recommended domestic policy executive actions that we included in our tracker. The post went on to provide context for these findings by tracing Project 2025’s circuitous route from obscure presidential transition report to controversial playbook for the Trump administration. Here, we provide further context for our findings by examining some factors that shed light on how significant this progress really is.