Professor Rachel Rothschild Selected to Receive 2025–2026 Pace Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award

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The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is excited to announce that Professor Rachel Rothschild has been selected to receive the 2025–2026 Pace Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award. The Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award is presented annually to an emerging junior environmental law professor who exhibits scholarly excellence and promise at an early stage in their career. The Haub Environmental Law Faculty solicits nominations from law professors throughout the country and selects a recipient from that pool of nominations. The award recipient is invited to present his/her recent scholarship to the Pace Haub Law community.

Professor Rachel Rothschild is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, she was a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity. From 2015 to 2017, she was an assistant professor and faculty fellow at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Professor Rothschild’s scholarship sits at the intersection of environmental law, history, and policy. Her recent research examines climate change law and policy as well as the past and present regulation of toxic substances.

“Professor Rothschild’s interdisciplinary scholarship allows for a unique perspective and approach to environmental law, climate change, and regulatory law and has already influenced the adoption and design of environmental statutes,” said Katrina Fischer Kuh, Faculty Director of the Environmental Law Program and Haub Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. “Our Pace Haub Law community looks forward to welcoming and engaging with Professor Rothschild and learning from her in these subject areas.”

Professor Rothschild is the author of Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and has written numerous articles and essays on pollution problems for academic journals and media outlets. Her recent publications include The Origins of the Major Questions Doctrine, which examines how a legal challenge against a toxic chemical regulation became foundational precedent for the newly named major questions doctrine. She has also co-authored a paper, Development of the Navigation Guide Evidence-to-Decision Framework for Environmental Health, that aims to improve the use of science when regulating toxic chemicals, and has explored how physicists shaped judicial understandings of environmental expertise in the article Physicists as Environmental Experts. She is currently working on her second book project, tentatively titled Environmental Science and the Administrative State, which will examine the history of environmental science, regulation, and the courts from roughly the 1970s to the present.

“I am so thrilled to receive the 2025–2026 Pace Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award,” said Professor Rothschild. “It is an enormous honor to follow in the footsteps of previous award winners, who are a formidable group of scholars. I am also extremely grateful to the faculty at Pace Haub, many of whom provided incredible mentorship to me as I was preparing to transition to legal academia. It will be wonderful to share my recent scholarship with such an outstanding group of environmental law professors and receive their feedback on my work.”

Professor Rothschild holds a JD, cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was a Furman Academic Scholar, and a PhD in history of science from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She earned her BA, magna cum laude, from Princeton University.

Professor Rothschild will deliver the lunch keynote presentation on State Climate Superfunds at the 12th annual Future Environmental Law Professors Workshop organized and hosted by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University.