HUCE Special Lecture with Professors Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus

October 1, 2015 | "Will the Courts Strike Down the President's Clean Power Plan?" with Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law; Director, Environmental Law Program, Harvard Law School; Richard Lazarus, Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law, Harvard Law SchoolModerated By: Daniel Schrag, Hooper Professor of Geology; Professor, Harvard Paulson School; Director, Harvard University Center for the Environment

Jody Freeman is the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and the founding director of the Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy Program. She is a leading scholar of both administrative law and environmental law. Professor Freeman's new book, GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE AND U.S. LAW (co-edited with Michael Gerrard) was published in 2015.

Professor Freeman served in the White House as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in 2009-10, where she was the architect of the president's historic agreement with the auto industry to double fuel efficiency standards, launching the administration's greenhouse gas program under the Clean Air Act. In her role, she also contributed to a host of initiatives on renewable energy, energy efficiency, transmission policy and oil and gas drilling, as well as the administration's effort to pass legislation placing a market based cap on carbon.

After leaving the administration, Freeman served as an independent consultant to the President's bipartisan Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. She has been appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States, the government think tank for improving the administrative and regulatory process, and elected the American College of Environmental Lawyers. In 2012, Professor Freeman was elected as an outside director of ConocoPhillips, where she serves on the public policy and compensation committees.

Professor Freeman has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and Los Angeles Times.

Richard Lazarus is the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard University, where he teaches environmental law, natural resources Law, Supreme Court advocacy, and torts. Professor Lazarus has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the United States Supreme Court in 40 cases and has presented oral argument in 13 of those cases. His primary areas of legal scholarship are environmental and natural resources law, with particular emphasis on constitutional law and the Supreme Court. He has published two books, The Making of Environmental Law (U. Chicago 2004), and Environmental Law Stories (Aspen Press, co-edited with O. Houck 2005). He was also the principal author of Deep Water - The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling (GPO 2011), which is the Report to the President of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission, for which he served as the Executive Director. The Commission was charged with investigating the root causes of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and recommending changes in law and policy to reduce the risk of future spills and to mitigate their impacts. Prior to joining the Harvard law faculty, Professor Lazarus was the Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professor of Law at Georgetown University, where he also founded the Supreme Court Institute. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979 and has a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois.

Daniel P. Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Schrag studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth history. He is particularly interested in how information on climate change from the geologic past can lead to better understanding of anthropogenic climate change in the future. In addition to his work on geochemistry and climatology, Schrag studies energy technology and policy, including carbon capture and storage and low-carbon synthetic fuels.

Schrag currently serves on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Among various honors, he is the recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union and a MacArthur Fellowship. Schrag earned a B.S. in geology and geophysics and political science from Yale University and his Ph.D. in geology from the University of California at Berkeley. He came to Harvard in 1997 after teaching at Princeton.