Michael Livermore
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Michael Livermore is professor of law and the director of the Program in Law, Communities, and the Environment (PLACE) at the University of Virginia School of Law. His research focuses on environmental law, economics, and ethics and the use of computational and natural language processing techniques to study the law and legal institutions. He frequently collaborates on interdisciplinary projects with researchers in other academic fields, including economics, computer science, neurology and the humanities. He was the founding executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, was a law clerk for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Michael Livermore holds the "Major Changes" Chair supported by Sorbonne Université and the Paris IAS.
Research topics
Environmental Law, Computational Legal Analysis, Regulation, Cost-Benefit Analysis
Law and Ethics at the Borderland between Human, Natural, and Artificial
Scientific and technological advances in recent decades have led to two seemingly contradictory developments. The first is pervasive human influence over the natural environment, a reality sometimes characterized as the Anthropocene. The second is the emergence of rival forms of advanced intelligence that could, in the long term, challenge the ecological dominance of Homo sapiens. National and transnational legal regimes have evolved in light of these developments, but their inadequacy is apparent in global environmental crisis and the diverse, mostly unregulated threats associated with advanced artificial intelligence (AI). A characteristic challenge of governance in both the environmental and AI domains is that risks emerge at the interface of human society and non-human systems that are (at least potentially) adaptive and goal-directed.
This project explores symmetries in legal, ethical, and political responses to human-environment and human-AI interactions. In particular, the discourse in environmental law on alternatives to the anthropocentric perspective are relevant for AI governance, and insights on AI-alignment are relevant for environmental governance. The broader goal of the project is to create a framework for cross-disciplinary conversation across fields focused on the sustainability of the human project.
Key Publications
Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health (Oxford University Press 2020) (with Richard L. Revesz).
Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis (Santa Fe Institute Press 2019) (editor, with Daniel Rockmore).
“Sociopolitical Feedbacks and Climate Change,” 43 Harvard Environmental Law Review 119 (2019) (with Peter Howard).
 Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, for the LabEx DynamiTe seminar at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne  Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods  Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow at the CETEP - Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences  Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, as part of the scientific day "Naissance de l’Objet Interdisciplinaire: MaISoN - Maison des Intelligences Sociales et Numériques", held at the Paris-Saclay University  Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, as part of the "Conference on Empirical Legal Studies" held at the University of Chicago  Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, as part of the "Rennes School of Business Summit" on the theme of Sustainable Trasnformation |
 The Journal of Legal Studies |
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