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Michael A. Livermore is a professor of law at the University of Virginia.

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law, politics, environment, climate, AI, regulation, cost-benefit analysis, data science, text analysis

Michael A. Livermore is a legal academic whose research focuses on regulatory review, environmental law, cost-benefit analysis, and the application of data science techniques to legal texts. He frequently collaborates on interdisciplinary projects with researchers in other academic fields, including economics, computer science, neurology, and the humanities. 

Livermore’s work has appeared in leading law journals, including the Yale Law Journal and the University of Chicago Law Review, as well as peer-reviewed legal, scientific, and social science journals. 

Livermore is the coauthor of Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health (Oxford University Press, 2008). These books—both written with Richard L. Revesz—examine the intersection of politics and cost-benefit analysis in the context of U.S. regulatory decision making.

With collaborator Daniel N. Rockmore, Livermore edited Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis (Santa Fe Institute Press, 2019). This book describes a new research paradigm in legal scholarship that uses computational text analysis tools to study the law and legal institutions.

Prior to joining the faculty at UVA, Livermore was the founding executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, a think tank dedicated to improving the quality of government decision-making. He is a graduate of New York University School of Law and clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. His views have appeared in a variety of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

research interests