Jody Freeman

Freeman was raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1985, and a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Toronto in 1989. She went on to Master of Laws and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees from Harvard Law School, which she received in 1991 and 1995, respectively.[3]

In 1990–91, she clerked at the Ontario Court of Appeal for a panel of judges including future Canadian Supreme Court Justice and UN High Commissioner Louise Arbour. From 1995 to 2005, Freeman was a Professor of Law at UCLA, where she co-founded the Environmental Law Program and was an award-winning teacher. From 2001 to 2004, Freeman also taught environmental law and served as Associate Dean for Law and Policy at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UCSB.

She has been a visiting professor at Georgetown Law Center, New York University Law School, and Stanford Law School.

In 2005, Freeman joined the Harvard Law School faculty.[4] She was one of a number of prominent hires made during Dean Elena Kagan's tenure.[5] In 2006, she founded Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law and Policy program,[6] a legal "think tank" for climate and energy policy analysis, and established one of the nation's leading environmental law clinics.[7]

In 2006, Freeman authored an amicus brief[8] on behalf of former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the global warming case decided by the Supreme Court in 2007.

From 2009–2010, she served as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House.[9]

In 2015, she and her colleague Richard Lazarus co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of William D. Ruckelshaus and William K. Reilly, former Administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, supporting the government in the litigation over the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan.[10]

In the White House, Freeman led the Obama administration's effort to double fuel efficiency standards, producing the historic agreement with the auto industry to set the nation's first federal greenhouse gas standards, and launching a program of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. As a Deputy and Counselor to Carol Browner, Director of the new White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, Freeman also contributed to a variety of policy initiatives on American energy and climate change issues, including greenhouse gas regulation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, oil and gas drilling, and the design of comprehensive legislation to place a market-based cap on carbon. After leaving the administration, she served as an independent consultant to the President's bipartisan Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, advising on structural reforms to offshore drilling.[11]

Freeman is a scholar of both administrative law and environmental law, and has written extensively about climate change, environmental regulation and executive power.[12] She is known for her early work on "collaborative governance," which helped to establish a field focused on public-private approaches to regulatory problems.

Freeman is widely published in leading American law reviews and is one of the most cited scholars in public law across the U.S.[13] She has produced several books, including Global Climate Change and U.S. Law (3d ed. 2023, with Michael Gerrard and Michael Burger), Moving to Markets in Environmental Regulation, Lessons after Twenty Years of Experience (2006, with economist Charles Kolstad)[14] and Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (2009, with former Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow).[15] Freeman has also co-authored leading casebooks in both administrative law and environmental law.[16] Her work has been published in several languages; a volume of her administrative law articles was published in Chinese in 2010.

She consults regularly for government and non-governmental parties, advising on litigation and regulatory strategy. She has written guest opinion pieces for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Politico, Vox and Foreign Affairs.

In 2022, Freeman faced significant criticism for a perceived conflict of interest regarding her simultaneous climate leadership roles at Harvard, and her service as director on the board of oil and gas major ConocoPhillips. In March 2022, Harvard students called on her to choose between her $350,000/year ConocoPhillips salary and her Harvard leadership responsibilities.[22] In April 2022, fellow Harvard faculty had raised concerns about her receipt of a major Harvard research grant to study corporate net-zero pledges at the same time that ConocoPhillips was attracting scrutiny for greenwashing.[23] In April 2023, in wake of the approval of the Willow project, The Guardian published emails reportedly showing Freeman participating in the company's lobbying efforts to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission to weaken its climate risk disclosure rules.[24] The Guardian also noted that Freeman's emails may have violated Harvard policy requiring affirmative disclosure of conflicts of interest in each communication with a policymaking audience. Freeman denied any policy violations. Following publication of the emails, a group of Freeman's students joined the call for her to resign.[25]

In August 2023, Freeman resigned from the ConocoPhillips board.[26]In her announcement, she noted that it would allow her to "focus on my research at Harvard and make space for some new opportunities."