Daniel C. Esty ’86 Elected a Fellow of the ACOEL
Daniel C. Esty ’86 is among the twenty-two lawyers elected to the American College of Environmental Lawyers (ACOEL) for 2015. All were selected by their peers for their distinguished experience and high standards in the practice of environmental law.
“It is a great honor to be elected to the ACOEL, particularly as the selection represents the judgment of the top-tier of environmental lawyers across the nation,” says Esty.
Esty is the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University. As a professor at Yale since 1994, he holds faculty appointments in both Yale’s Environment and Law Schools and directs the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and serves on the Board of the Center for Business & Environment at Yale, which he founded in 2006.
From 2011 to early 2014, Professor Esty served as Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. In this role, he worked to create a model 21st century regulatory agency that used a “LEAN” process to redesign all of its permitting programs for greater speed, efficiency, customer orientation, and compliance focus resulting in transformed outcomes. Likewise, he designed an innovative energy strategy for the state designed to fulfill Governor Dannel Malloy’s commitment to cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy—including a shift away from subsidies toward a focus on finance using creative policy tools such as reverse auctions, power purchase agreements, a first-in-the-nation Green Bank, and a statewide Property Assessed Clean Energy program.
Professor Esty is the author or editor of ten books and numerous articles on sustainability and environmental issues and the relationships between environmental protection and corporate strategy, competitiveness, trade, globalization, metrics, governance, and development. He has undertaken path breaking research and writing on regulatory federalism, “trade and the environment,” corporate environmental performance measurement, and administrative law in the global context.
His prizewinning book (with Andrew Winston), Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, argues that pollution control and natural resource management have become critical elements of marketplace success and explains how leading-edge companies have folded environmental thinking into their core business strategies. His most recent book (with P.J. Simmons), The Green to Gold Business Playbook: How to Implement Sustainability Practices for Bottom-Line Results in Every Business Function, offers practical advice on how to execute a sustainability strategy across a wide range of businesses and activities. His current research focuses on rethinking environmental policy for the 21st century and developing metrics for gauging environmental and sustainability performance at the global, national, city, and corporate scales.
The American College of Environmental Lawyers is a professional association of distinguished lawyers who practice in the field of environmental law. Membership is by invitation and members are recognized by their peers as preeminent in their field. ACOEL members are dedicated to maintaining and improving the ethical practice of environmental law, the administration of justice, and the development of environmental law at both the state and federal level.
