When most people picture the front lines of climate action, they might imagine high-stakes negotiations on the sidelines of Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, or policy fights on Capitol Hill. Few would think of an administrative hearing room in Lansing, Michigan. Yet it is inside the chambers of the Michigan Public Service Commission, an agency most Michiganders would struggle to name, that Clinical Professor Mark Templeton and his students are waging some of the most consequential climate battles in the Midwest.

For the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, which Templeton cofounded in 2012 and still directs, the choice to focus on this somewhat obscure state agency was strategic. Within its walls, regulators make binding decisions about retiring coal plants, expanding renewable energy, and improving efficiency, choices that will define Michigan’s energy future for decades.

“State public utility commissions are where the rubber hits the road on energy decisions,” Templeton said. “The regulators are the ones who decide what actually happens.”

And Templeton’s students are often the ones making the arguments to ensure the transition to clean energy benefits everyone, not just utilities and their shareholders. “We pioneered bringing the perspectives of energy justice organizations into state utility commission proceedings,” he said. “It was an approach that hadn’t been tried before in the Midwest.”

The focus of Templeton and his Clinical Fellows (Jacob Schuhardt and Alexandria Miskho) on finding points of leverage within complex systems exemplifies how UChicago Law scholars and clinicians are approaching climate change: by spotting where legal interventions can have maximum impact, then unleashing rigorous analysis to shape outcomes.

From tax policy to corporate governance to climate litigation, Law School faculty—working within and alongside the University’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, which launched in 2024—are redefining how law, economics, science, and sustainability can intersect by crafting policies and legal strategies to meet the shifting challenges of a rapidly warming world.

Maximizing Impact in Michigan

Through almost a decade of work, the Abrams Clinic has piled victory upon victory at the commission. These wins have translated into cleaner air, healthier communities, and hundreds of millions of dollars in cleaner grid investments, all while aiming to keep rates affordable. That final point is crucial in a state where one in four people struggles to pay for power.

Which is why the clinic doesn’t just advocate for faster carbon reductions. It asks: where will the benefits flow? Will rooftop solar generate wealth in communities like Detroit that have been overlooked when it comes to renewable energy investment, or will utilities simply build solar farms on agricultural land? “There has to be a conscious effort to make sure the benefits are being shared equitably,” said Templeton. “Because the burdens certainly haven’t been.”

And they’ve been succeeding on a grand scale. Last year, a student’s cross-examination of utility executives was so effective it prompted an approximately $500 million commitment to upgrade electrical infrastructure in environmental justice communities (areas disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards) across western Michigan over the next decade. “It was a thing of beauty to watch,” said Templeton, with quasi-parental pride. “Our students can be very effective at putting witnesses on the hot seat and using them to prove our points.” 

Working with other interested parties, Templeton’s students also helped shut down DTE Energy’s Monroe coal plant on Lake Erie, one of the nation’s dirtiest, three years ahead of schedule. The decision will cut roughly 21.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, and the cleaner air will generate an estimated $3 billion in public-health benefits in southeast Michigan.

In 2017, the clinic began its longstanding partnership with Soulardarity, a grassroots organization in Highland Park, Michigan, which advocates for community solar projects. Representing the group, the clinic compelled DTE Energy to fund three solar installations in neighborhoods long plagued by power outages and downed lines. They also helped to win roughly $100 million to help low-income ratepayers manage the transition to clean energy and pay their bills.

At the national level, the clinic regularly contributes amicus briefs to cases challenging executive action that rolls back climate regulations, such as weakening rules on coal-fired power plants and loosening vehicle emissions standards. For the 31 students currently participating in the clinic, these cases represent their first taste of major responsibility in high-stakes matters.

“We’re trying to achieve two goals at once,” Templeton said, “to make an impact in the environmental and energy space, and to have a meaningful effect on students: their lives and professional development. I’m always focused on optimizing and maximizing both outcomes.”

Finding Solutions Internationally

While Templeton and his students are busy in Michigan’s regulatory trenches, David Weisbach is operating on an entirely different scale. His work tackles what may be the most difficult obstacle to meaningful climate action: the global coordination problem that has impeded international efforts for decades.

The challenge is deceptively simple. Each country benefits if it can continue to burn fossil fuels while others reduce their emissions. The result at international climate summits, as Weisbach puts it, is that “everybody blames everybody else” while emissions continue to rise.

Years ago, economists and policymakers identified a manifestation of this problem called “leakage.” When one country imposes a carbon tax, it incentivizes companies to relocate emissions-intensive industries overseas.

But Weisbach, who is the Walter J. Blum Professor of Law, uncovered an ingenious mathematical solution to the leakage problem. In 2008, he and Samuel Kortum, an economist then at UChicago and now at Yale University, built a model of the world economy accounting for trade flows and carbon movement through global supply chains. Weisbach says the model produced an answer. And the breakthrough was remarkably elegant.

Most proposed carbon-tax bills, as well as many existing policies in other countries, aim to prevent carbon leakage through border adjustments: usually by taxing domestic extraction and imports at the same rate while fully rebating exports. These measures are meant to protect the competitiveness of domestic industries while discouraging carbon-intensive production from moving abroad. Weisbach, however, argues that while this approach can reduce domestic emissions while protecting domestic industries, it lowers global prices for fossil fuels, which in turn encourages foreign fossil-fuel companies to increase their use of fossil fuels. 

Weisbach and Kortum’s insight is that a well-designed policy can prevent foreign companies from increasing their use of fossil fuels. The key to doing so is to tax not just the use of fossil fuels but also their extraction— to tax both the supply and demand for fossil fuels. By combining taxes on the supply and demand for fossil fuels, domestic climate policy will not lower global prices of fossil fuels and, as a result, prevent foreign companies from flooding the market. Even better, they show that this the policy is very easy to implement, involving almost ministerial changes to current carbon tax proposals.

The simplicity of the proposal is striking. “It’s literally changing a couple of numbers in existing carbon-tax bills,” Weisbach said.

The proposed policy—combining taxes on the supply and demand for fossil fuels—works remarkably well in simulations. When modeled across countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the approach delivers more than double the emission reductions of conventional carbon taxes. Add China into the mix, and reductions become “very dramatic,” he said.

Weisbach and Kortum’s ideas remain theoretical. But they offer a fresh perspective on what has long seemed an intractable problem, one that continues to confound policymakers. “Politics has a set way of talking about things,” he said. “When you suggest a different approach, people’s brains can sometimes switch off.”

Dozens of countries have carbon taxes. The European Union’s border-adjustment mechanism came into force earlier this year. Passing one in the US, however, seems a distant prospect. “I’m a law professor,” said Weisbach, when asked about balancing economic optimality with political feasibility. “By definition, I’m not good at politics.”

Instead, Weisbach focuses on finding the best possible solutions to thorny international problems so that the politicians have options at their disposal when it comes time to negotiate.

Analyzing the Psychology Behind the Problem

Weisbach’s Energy Plus Tax offers a compelling answer to the leakage problem. Even so, sooner or later sound policy design will collide with human psychology. Assistant Professor Hajin Kim’s research sheds light on why carbon pricing repeatedly falters at the national level, focusing on how the public interprets these policies.

For decades, environmentalists and moral philosophers have argued that putting a price on pollution cheapens the environment by turning something morally sacred—priceless—into a tradable good. This claim often appears in academic debate. Yet it had never been empirically tested. Kim decided to test it.

She designed an experiment around a fictional air pollutant, malzene, described as causing asthma. Kim randomly assigned participants to different regulatory regimes— no regulations, pollution taxes, cap-and-trade, or direct mandates—and asked them to evaluate the pollutant. The result was clear: people’s reaction did not vary by regulatory approach. Pricing malzene did not dilute people’s concern. The critique, Kim found, was without empirical basis.

But then Kim found something economists hadn’t predicted. She also asked participants about their preferred policy instrument—which would they choose? People, it turned out, strongly preferred a mandate to market mechanisms like taxes, even though economists tend to consider mandates less efficient and more expensive.

“There are ways to make carbon taxes more politically attractive,” Kim said. “But if I were a policymaker, I would probably try to get passed what I could get passed. That might be more mandate than market.”

Kim arrived at climate policy through social psychology. As a Stanford University PhD student expecting to focus on economics and policy, she took a course on social norms that “completely changed the way I think about the law,” she said. Her realization was profound. Laws regulate behavior, of course, but they also send signals about what society values, and those signals end up shaping how people respond to corporate behavior.

When Kim started researching corporate sustainability efforts in 2014, the academic response was mostly dismissive. Corporate law scholars told her corporate social responsibility wasn’t real: just “fluffy stuff.” Environmental lawyers, too, were equally skeptical. Why study voluntary efforts when what we really need is regulation?

“For a long time, my research topics were something of a stepchild,” Kim said, “sitting on the margins of both corporate and environmental law.”

Then, around 2020, ESG exploded, and Kim’s research started getting more attention. But then came the backlash. Today, as companies retreat from climate commitments and some states are trying to prevent consideration of “ESG factors” (even when those factors include whether hurricanes might affect insurers’ returns), Kim’s early work appears highly prescient.

Take her work on mandatory corporate social responsibility. Does legally requiring companies to consider their social impact undermine the reputational benefits of doing good? Imagine two high-school students: one volunteers by choice, while the other does so to meet a graduation requirement. Which one deserves more credit?

Kim’s surveys revealed two effects at work. Companies that act voluntarily earn outsized reputational rewards, while firms that flout mandatory requirements face harsher backlash. More troubling, however, are the consequences of the widespread belief that companies exist solely to maximize profits. When that assumption takes hold, Kim found people much less inclined to reward positive behavior or chastise harmful conduct.

“We are losing societal win-wins,” Kim argued. “We are losing stakeholders rewarding companies for good acts and punishing them for bad.” 

Kim’s research benefits from an institutional commitment to tackling climate change at full scale. Like Templeton and Weisbach, Kim is affiliated with UChicago’s Institute for Climate Change and Sustainable Growth, where conversations range from lithium battery design to solar geoengineering and AI-driven weather forecasing. The result is a research environment that mirrors the complexity of the challenge. “I learn so much,” Kim said. “There’s constant osmosis from the amazing work happening across campus.”

A Legacy That Extends Beyond the Law School

For Templeton, the clinic’s success is measured not only in regulatory wins or carbon reductions, but in the paths his students take after they leave the hearing room. Over more than a decade, the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic has served as a launching pad for students and fellows who now occupy influential roles across the environmental and energy landscape—at advocacy organizations, in government, and within the private sector. Graduates have gone on to work at leading environmental organizations like Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Law and Policy Center, as well as at the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, and major law firms and corporations.

Alongside the work of faculty like Weisbach and Kim, the Abrams Clinic exemplifies UChicago’s distinctive approach to climate change: rigorous, interdisciplinary, and grounded in real-world outcomes. From utility commission hearing rooms to global carbon markets, and from behavioral research labs to alumni shaping policy on the front lines, the Law School’s climate work reflects a simple but powerful idea—that durable solutions emerge when scholarship, advocacy, and education move forward together.