Douglas Kysar Appointed the Field ’55 Professor of Law

Douglas A. Kysar, the newly named Joseph M. Field ‘55 Professor of Law, focuses his teaching and research in the areas of tort law, risk regulation, environmental law and sustainable development.

He has published articles on an array of environmental law and policymaking topics and has most recently published a casebook, “The Torts Process,” with James A. Henderson Jr., Richard N. Pearson and John A. Siliciano. His forthcoming book, “Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity,” is under contract with Yale University Press. It explores limitations of the turn toward risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis and other elite knowledge structures in the determination of environmental law and policy.

Kysar joined the Yale faculty after teaching law at Cornell University from 2001 to 2008. He has been a visiting professor at the law schools of the University of California-Los Angeles, Harvard and Yale; a visiting scholar at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; and a Distinguished Environmental Law Lecturer at the Florida State University College of Law. He formerly served as an associate in the firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot and as a law clerk to Chief Judge William G. Young of the United States District Court, Massachusetts.

Kysar was selected twice by students to be the convocation speaker at Cornell Law School. From 2006 to 2008 he served as the national societal and ethical issues coordinator for the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network and he was a co-principal investigator on a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant from the National Science Foundation. His work on these collaborative projects was to examine the ethical, political and legal issues raised by the emergence of new technologies.