Joshua Macey

Joshua Macey is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Macey teaches and writes about bankruptcy, environmental law, energy law, and the regulation of financial institutions. Macey’s latest work focuses on the fragility of the nation’s electric grid and offers strategies to improve grid reliability and accelerate the transition to new sources of energy.

In 2023, the American Bankruptcy Institute named Macey to its list of 40 Under 40 Emerging Leaders in Insolvency Practice. Macey has also won the Morrison Prize — awarded to the “most impactful sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North America during the previous year” — for three consecutive years (given, respectively, for “Zombie Energy Laws,” 73 Vanderbilt Law Review; “Long Live the Federal Power Act’s Bright Line,” 134 Harvard Law Review; and “Clean Energy Through Grid Reliability,” 74 Stanford Law Review).

Prior to his appointment at Yale Law School, Macey served as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He served on the University of Chicago Law School’s Journal and Faculty Appointments Committees, as well as the University of Chicago Business Law Review’s Faculty Advisory Board.

From 2019 to 2020, Macey was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley and clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Macey also co-authored the sixth edition of the leading energy law casebook, Energy, Economics, and the Environment.

Macey holds a B.A. from Yale College and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an Editor of the Yale Law Journal.