Douglas Kysar To Join Yale Law School Faculty

Douglas Kysar, one of the nation’s leading young scholars in environmental law, will join the Yale Law School faculty and begin teaching in the next academic year. Professor Kysar will be returning to Yale, having been a visiting professor at the Law School in the fall of 2005.

Professor Kysar is currently a visiting professor at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches torts. He has been a member of the faculty of Cornell Law School since 2001. His scholarship focuses mainly on the areas of environmental law and products liability and is marked by a strong interdisciplinary approach that combines conventional legal economic analysis with ideas from other disciplines, such as cognitive and social psychology, moral and political philosophy, ecology, and anthropology.

He earned a B.A. in Philosophy (summa cum laude) from Indiana University in 1995 and a J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1998. At Harvard Law, he received the Sears Prize and was a member of the Board of Student Advisors. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable William G. Young, Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, and practiced with Foley, Hoag, & Eliot in Boston before joining the faculty at Cornell.

Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh said, “In a few short years, Professor Doug Kysar has emerged as the most exciting new voice in domestic and international environmental law. Unlike those who prematurely proclaim the death of environmentalism, Professor Kysar would build from the bottom up, invoking principles of precaution and sustainable development to promote a more broadly participatory process of environmental lawmaking.  Professor Kysar advocates a new approach that would democratize science and regulation by asking whether global and local environmental laws can be better fused with consumer sovereignty, risk management strategies, and economic policy to serve real human needs.”

Professor Kysar’s numerous articles cover a range of topics relevant to the regulation of environmental, health, and safety risks, including consumer risk perception, corporate advertising and marketing practices, economic modeling of the environment, and the uses and abuses of scientific information in environmental policy debates. They have appeared in such publications as the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, Ecology Law Quarterly, and the Boston College Law Review. Two of his articles have been selected for presentation in the environmental law category at the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum.

He is author of several books, including The Torts Process (with James A. Henderson, Jr., Richard N. Pearson, and John A. Siliciano, 2007), the forthcoming Environmental Policy and Law (with Yale Law School Professor Daniel Esty ’86), and the forthcoming anthology, Economics of Environmental Law (co-edited with Yale Law School Professor Richard Brooks and Nathaniel Keohane). He is also currently working on a manuscript, "Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity," which is under contract with Yale University Press. 

In addition to UCLA and Yale, he has been a visiting associate professor at Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.