Student-Led Environmental Law Conference Wins American Bar Association Award
The 2025 New Directions in Environmental Law Conference (NDEL) has been named the winner of the 2026 Environment, Energy, and Resources Law Student Program of the Year Award.
Awarded annually by the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, the award recognizes the best student-led educational program or public service project focused on issues in environmental, energy, or natural resources law.
The New Directions in Environmental Law Conference is a student-organized conference that has been hosted annually since 2011. The conference was co-founded by Clinical Associate Professor of Law Stephanie Safdi ’13 when she was a Law School student.
The 2025 NDEL conference brought together students, academics, and practitioners to discuss timely issues in environmental law, governance, and policy. The event included lectures and panel discussions from experts on indigenous rights, climate migration, and biodiversity, among other environmental and legal topics.
The conference also featured keynote addresses from Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and Ali Zaidi, former White House national climate advisor, assistant to the president of the United States, and head of the White House Climate Policy Office.
The 2025 NDEL conference was co-hosted by Yale Law School, Yale School of the Environment, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, and Vermont Law & Graduate School.
Douglas Kysar, Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law, has helped supervise the conference over the years alongside Joshua Galperin, professor of law at Pace’s Haub School of Law. Galperin, who is associate dean of the Environmental Law Program and the faculty director of the Sustainable Business Law Hub at Pace’s Haub School of Law, is also a frequent visiting professor at Yale Law School and the faculty advisor for the Environmental Law Program at the Yale School of the Environment.
“The 2025 NDEL conference was a great event to bring together students, practitioners, scholars, and even undergraduate and high school students interested in the possibilities of environmental law,” said Galperin. “Steph Prufer ’26 JD/MEM and Frances Rudolph (Haub Law Class of 2026) did a masterful job pulling together one of the biggest and most impressive events to date, leading a brilliant team of organizers from across institutions, and doing it all in a very challenging time for environmental law, democracy, and many other things we hold dear.”
NDEL’s organizers will receive their award at the ABA’s 34th Fall Conference, held Oct. 16–18, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The 2027 NDEL conference will be held Feb. 26–27, 2027.
