Howard Latin

Distinguished professor of law and justice, John J. Francis Scholar (global climate change, toxic torts and toxic substances regulation, torts, products liability, law and economics)

Howard A. Latin joined the Rutgers faculty in 1976 after earning a B.A. from Brandeis and a J.D. from the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley, where he was the lead articles editor of the California Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.

Professor Latin has published many articles in the fields of environmental law, torts, and products liability, including seven articles reprinted in collections of the "best of the year" or "best of all time" in those fields. His recent book, Climate Change Policy Failures: Why Conventional Mitigation Approaches Cannot Succeed (2012), explains why current national and international mitigation programs would achieve too little greenhouse gas reductions over too long a period of time, and consequently would not be able to stabilize or curtail steadily increasing climate change risks. Professor Latin has also completed a long book chapter on climate change problems, "Framing Global Climate Change," in Climate Change: A Reader (William H. Rodgers, Jr., et al., editions.) And he is now working on an article about India and its high probability of climate change disasters, while the nation must choose among alternative precautionary climate policies.

Professor Latin was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia during 1992 and South Africa during 1997. He has been a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and UCLA School of Law; a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Institute in Lake Como, Italy, the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley, and the Richardson School of Law of the University of Hawaii; and in spring 2006, Latin was the Distinguished Visiting Environmental Law Scholar at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.

He has traveled to more than 40 countries in the past three decades while conducting research on global climate change and international biodiversity conservation issues. Latin is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and has served as a consultant on environmental and torts issues to government agencies and public advocacy groups.