28 Feb 2017
The 2017 Pound Lecture is scheduled for Friday, March 10th from 12:10-1:10 p.m. Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will present “The Limits of Executive Power: The Obama-Trump Transition.”
Professor Freeman is a leading scholar of both administrative law and environmental law and has written extensively on federal agency regulation, climate change, energy and environmental policy, and executive authority. Professor Freeman’s book, Global Climate Change and U.S. Law (co-edited with Michael Gerrard) was published in 2015.
Professor Freeman served in the White House as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in 2009-10, where she was the architect of the president’s historic agreement with the auto industry to double fuel efficiency standards, launching the administration’s greenhouse gas program under the Clean Air Act. In her role, she also contributed to a host of initiatives on renewable energy, energy efficiency, transmission policy and oil and gas drilling, as well as the administration’s effort to pass climate and energy legislation.
After leaving the administration, Freeman served as an independent consultant to the President’s bipartisan Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. She has been appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States, the government think tank for improving the administrative and regulatory process, and elected the American College of Environmental Lawyers. In 2012, Professor Freeman was elected as an outside director of ConocoPhillips, where she serves on the public policy and compensation committees.
During her presentation, Freeman will discuss the executive power President Obama used to accomplish many of his domestic and international policy goals, especially, in the area of climate and energy policy. What is the risk that a Trump administration will significantly repeal the Obama legacy. What are the legal constraints on roll-back and retrenchment, and what, as a result, is the lesson about the limits of Executive Power?