Linda Breggin

Linda Breggin
Senior Attorney; Director of the Center for State and Local Governance

Linda Breggin is a Senior Attorney with the Environmental Law Institute where she has managed a wide range of environmental law and policy projects for over 20 years. She is also a Senior Strategic Advisor to the Nashville Food Waste Initiative. Among her projects is the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review, a collaboration with Vanderbilt University Law School, in which students work with her and her co-instructor as well as an expert advisory committee to select some of the most innovative proposals in the legal academic literature each year and showcase them for policymakers and practitioners at an annual conference and in the August issue of the Environmental Law Reporter. She is the author of the “Around the States” column in The Environmental Forum, ELI’s award-winning policy journal. Ms. Breggin previously served as an Associate Director in the White House Office on Environmental Policy, Counsel to a congressional subcommittee, a Special Assistant in the Office of Enforcement, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Counsel to a large, New York-based law firm. She is a graduate of Tulane University and the University of Chicago Law School.

Media Guide
Expertise
  • Chemicals: Toxic Substance Control Act reform; nanotechnology governance
  • Enforcement: environmental enforcement under state and federal laws
  • Industrial Agriculture: water and air pollution; climate; food waste
  • Toxic Waste: Superfund law; brownfields cleanup and redevelopment; toxics release inventory; environmental justice
  • Water: point source and nonpoint source pollution
Education
  • J.D., University of Chicago, 1988
  • B.A., Tulane University, 1984
Selected Publications
  • Columnist, Around the States, (The Environmental Forum 2011- present).
  • Co-Author, "Tackling the Problem of CAFOs and Climate Change: A New Path to Improved Animal Welfare?" Chapter in What Can Animal Law Learn from Environmental Law, R. Abate ed. (ELI 2020).
  • Co-Author, Landscape Analysis of Community Composting in Nashville (ELI February 2020).
  • Co-Author, Pollution Prevention and Rethinking Waste, ELR News and Analysis Dialogue, 49 ELR 10515 (June 2019).
  • Author, Real Benefits Fostering Food Scrap Recycling, The Environmental Forum (May/June 2019).
  • Co-Author, Landscape Analysis of Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional Food Scrap Recycling in Nashville (ELI March 2019).
  • Co-Author, Nashville Food Rescue Landscape Analysis (ELI November 2017).
  • Co-Author, Big Data Enabling Big Protection for the Environment, Chapter in Big Data Big Challenges in Evidence-Based Policy-Making, K. Jayasuriya (West 2015).
  • Co-Author, Trends in Environmental Law Scholarship 2008-2014, 45 ELR 10731 (2015).
  • Co-Author and Co-Editor, Citizen Action Handbook on Watershed Assessment and Restoration (Tennessee Environmental Council 2015).
  • Co-Author, Big Data and Environmental Protection: An Initial Survey of Public and Private Initiatives (ELI 2014).  
  • Co-Author, Farm Policy and Environmental Protection: It’s Time to Raise the Bar, Harvard Environmental Law Review Blog Post (April 2014).
  • Author/Editor, Interviews with Private Governance Experts, 44 ELR 10102 (2014).
  • Co-Author, It’s Time to Put a Price Tag on the Environmental Impacts of Commodity Crop Agriculture, ELR (2013).
  • Co-Author, Subsidies with Responsibilities:  Placing Stewardship and Disclosure Conditions on Government Payments to Large-Scale Commodity Crop Operations, 37 Harvard Environmental Law Review 487(2013).