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Welcome! My name is Michael A. Livermore and I’m a law professor at the University of Virginia. I work primarily in the areas of environmental law, ethics, and economics; administrative law and regulation; and computational legal studies.

Much of my environmental work has centered on the use of cost-benefit analysis in regulatory decision making. When used properly, this analytic tool clarifies the tradeoffs at the heart of environmental policy by assessing risks, forecasting consequences, and confronting difficult value and empirical questions. The goal of cost-benefit analysis is not to replace politics with an optimization procedure, but to provide a vehicle for analysis, expertise, and evidence to inform political decision making.

For the past decade, I’ve complemented this normative work with empirical scholarship in the field of law-as-data, a research paradigm that uses computational tools to study law and legal institutions. Law-as-data has roots in empirical legal studies, and further back, pragmatism and legal realism. Rather than viewing the law as an abstract set of rules to be converted into computable algorithms, this tradition views the law as a living social and political practice. Law-as-data research draws analytic tools and methods from data science, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to study and inform — rather than replace — this human phenomenon.

Recently, I have explored legal and philosophical questions related to environmental and technological ethics and welfarism. This work touches on nature’s rights, ecocentrism, the status of artificial subjectivities, and the value of diversity. My current book project, Varieties of Being, develops a theory of moral value that seeks to bridge traditional divides between environmental and economic perspectives.