Professor Jody Freeman will return to the Harvard Law School faculty in March 2010, after serving in the White House as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change since January, 2009.
Professor Freeman, a leading scholar of administrative and environmental law, will be appointed to an endowed chair in public law named for former Solicitor General and Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and will work at the law school and across the university to harness Harvard’s talent and resources toward shaping global energy policy. She will also resume her role as Director of the Law School’s Environmental Law Program, which she founded in 2006, and which houses one of the nation’s top environmental law and policy clinics.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Jody back after her tremendous service in the White House,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. “In more than a year of intensive policy review and implementation, she made major contributions to the shaping of bold and innovative new initiatives in environmental and energy policy, and she will now bring the lessons and insights from that experience here to the Law School and to the wider university. Her knowledge will be invaluable to students and colleagues engaged in the critical search for solutions to the staggering environmental and energy challenges we face nationally and globally.”
In her role as Counselor to Carol Browner, Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change (OECC), Freeman contributed to a variety of policy initiatives on American energy and climate change issues, including the pursuit of comprehensive energy and climate legislation that would place a market-based cap on carbon. The OECC has supported the Obama Administration’s efforts to reduce dependence on oil, cut greenhouse gas pollution, advance energy efficiency and spur American leadership in clean energy manufacturing, including efforts undertaken in the Recovery Act. The OECC helped to facilitate the President’s national auto policy, which was announced in a Rose Garden ceremony in May 2009. Led by EPA and DOT, the policy represents an historic agreement among the auto industry, California and key stakeholders to support the most ambitious federal fuel efficiency standards and the first-ever federal greenhouse gas standards.
Professor Freeman will return to campus in March and resume teaching in the Fall 2010 semester.
Freeman’s major works in environmental law include Timing and Form of Federal Regulation: The Case of Climate Change, 155 U. Penn. L. Rev. 1499 (2007), and Modular Environmental Regulation, 54 Duke L. Rev. 795 (2005). She is the co-author of a leading casebook in environmental law (with Daniel Farber and Ann Carlson) and has produced two other significant books: Moving to Markets in Environmental Regulation, Lessons after Twenty Years of Experience (Oxford University Press 2006, edited with Charles Kolstad) and Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2009, edited with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow). In 2006, Freeman authored an amicus brief on behalf of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in MA v. EPA, the global warming case decided by the Supreme Court in 2007. Her analysis of the implications of the case, Massachusetts v. EPA: From Politics to Expertise (with HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule), appears in the 2007 Supreme Court Review
Freeman has testified in Congress and before state commissions on administrative law and environmental law issues. She has served as vice-chair of the ABA Administrative Law Section sub-committees on Dispute Resolution and Environmental Law and Natural Resources. In 2006, she chaired the Executive Committee on Administrative Law for the Association of American Law Schools.