Tim Searchinger
Visiting Research Scholar 2007-2008
Biographical Sketch
Tim Searchinger is a research scholar visiting from the Georgetown University Law Center where he is a Senior Fellow of its Environmental Law and Policy Institute. Searchinger spent seventeen years as an attorney at the national advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Fund, where he directed its work on wetlands protection and agricultural policies and founded the Center for Conservation Incentives. He is a graduate, summa cum laude, of Amherst College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School where he was Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Prior to working for Environmental Defense, he served as a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals and as Deputy General Counsel to Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. His work has ranged from coordinating a coalition of groups working to reform federal agricultural policies, to writing papers on the effects of regulations on property values, to litigation to protect the Everglades and frequent briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. His writings tend to focus more on the scientific and economic issues related to policy than on purely legal topics. He most recently spent several months as a special adviser to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources on Chesapeake Bay clean-up strategies.Searchinger will spend his year writing a book on the environmental effects of agriculture, and analyzing the effects of biofuels on greenhouse gas emissions through indirect land conversion. He will simultaneously serve as a Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund, working with it on biofuels policy and writing a paper comparing agricultural conservation programs in Europe and the United States. He will teach a Freshman Seminar in the spring called, Food and the Planet.
