Environmental Law Faculty

Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments in the Law and Environment Schools and secondary appointments in the Management and Global Affairs Schools. He also serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and as co-director of the Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance. Esty has written or edited 14 books and dozens of articles on climate change, environmental protection, regulatory reform, and sustainability.

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In addition to risk perception, his areas of research include criminal law and evidence. Prior to coming to Yale in 1999, Professor Kahan was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court (1990-91) and to Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1989-90). He received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his J.D. from Harvard University.

Professor Douglas Kysar is Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and faculty co-director of the Law, Ethics and Animals Program. His teaching and research areas include torts, animal law, environmental law, climate change, products liability, and risk regulation. Kysar was previously on the faculty at Cornell Law School.

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.

Carol M. Rose is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization at Yale Law School. She joined the Law School faculty in 1989. Professor Rose teaches property, land use, environmental law, natural resources law, and intellectual property law.

Safdi’s research and practice areas include environmental law and justice, water law, land use, and Indigenous rights. From 2021 to 2024, Safdi was Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic, where she supervised students in environmental and civil rights litigation and administrative advocacy on behalf of Native American tribes and nonprofit organizations.

Gerald Torres is Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School. A pioneer in the field of environmental law, Torres has spent his career examining the intrinsic connections between the environment, agricultural and food systems, and social justice.