Cary Coglianese
Cary Coglianese specializes in the study of administrative law and regulatory processes, with an emphasis on the empirical evaluation of alternative processes and strategies and the role of public participation, technology, and business-government relations in policymaking.
The author of more than 300 articles, book chapters, reports, and essays, Coglianese’s most recent book projects have included: Achieving Regulatory Excellence; Does Regulation Kill Jobs?; Regulatory Breakdown: The Crisis of Confidence in U.S. Regulation; Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy; and Regulation and Regulatory Processes. He has also recently written on climate change policy, public participation and transparency in federal rulemaking, the use of artificial intelligence by government agencies, voluntary environmental programs, and role of waivers and exemptions in regulatory law.
The founding director of the Penn Program on Regulation, he previously served as Penn Carey Law’s Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, Coglianese spent a dozen years on the faculty at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government where he taught courses in environmental policy, policy analysis, and research methods, founded and chaired the school’s Regulatory Policy Program, and was an affiliated scholar at the Harvard Law School. He has served as a visiting law professor at Stanford University and Vanderbilt University.
A Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), a federal agency that develops recommendations for improving the administrative aspects of government, Coglianese has also served as a Public Member and the Chair of ACUS’s Rulemaking Committee. He has served as the chair and co-chair of several committees of the American Bar Association’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy as well as a member of the Section’s governing Council.
At Penn, he teaches courses in administrative law, environmental law, regulatory law and policy, and policy analysis. The chair of Penn Carey Law’s Government Service and Public Affairs Initiative, he is a faculty affiliate of Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. In addition, he serves as the faculty director for Penn Carey Law’s executive education program on regulatory analysis and decision-making and teaches periodically in the Wharton School’s executive education program.
He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the National Academy of Public Administration. He also founded the Law & Society Association’s international collaborative research network on regulatory governance, served as a founding editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Regulation & Governance, and created and now advises the daily production of The Regulatory Review, a global online publication covering issues of administrative and regulatory law and policy. He was also the creator and host of the podcast series, Race and Regulation, which focused on ways that regulation contributes to racial injustice as well as on how just regulatory policies can serve to combat inequalities in society.
In 2023, he was selected to serve as a member of an independent peer review panel providing feedback to the Office of Management and Budget on proposed revisions to its Circular A-4 on regulatory analysis. He has also served as the chair of a National Academy of Sciences committee that spent 17 months studying the implications for law and regulation of emerging trends in the maritime sector. He has previously served as a member of other Academy committees on performance-based regulation and on ways to improve federal inspections of offshore oil and gas development. He has also served on an Aspen Institute panel on energy governance, co-chaired an expert task force on water affordability issues for the American Water Works Association, and chaired a task force on transparency and public participation in rulemaking for the nonprofit organization OMB Watch. He has provided research and advice on various regulatory issues to the Alberta Energy Regulator (Canada), Environment Canada, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
