HLS Professor Jody Freeman LL.M. ’91 S.J.D. ’95 has been named Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the White House. She will serve as senior advisor to Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate “czar.”
The founding director of the HLS Environmental Law Program, Freeman is one of the nation’s leading environmental law and administrative law scholars. She has taught at HLS since 2005.
“I am really honored to be working on these issues for this President at this historic time,” said Freeman.
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 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.
Prior to joining HLS, Professor Freeman taught for 10 years at UCLA where in 2004 she received the law school’s Rutter Award for excellence in teaching, and in 2001 was voted Professor of the Year. At UCLA, she co-founded the law school’s Environmental Law Program.
In addition to her law degrees from Harvard, Freeman earned a B.A. from Stanford in 1985 and an LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1989.