Douglas A. Kysar

 Douglas A. Kysar is Deputy Dean and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale University Law School.

Prior to joining the Yale Law School faculty, Professor Kysar taught at Cornell Law School.  He served as a judicial clerk for the Honorable William G. Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2001, he practiced corporate law with Foley Hoag LLP. Since joining academia, Professor Kysar has consulted on litigation matters involving toxic torts and professional responsibility. He has been a visiting faculty member at Harvard, Yale, and UCLA Law Schools, 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.

Professor Kysar has served in the past as a co-principal investigator on a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant from the National Science Foundation, and as the national coordinator for research into societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology as part of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. His role in these collaborative projects was to examine the ethical, political, and legal issues raised by the emergence of new technologies, using the nascent field of nanotechnology as a case study.

Professor Kysar has published works in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, Ecology Law Quarterly, and the Boston College Law Review. These 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. In addition to these works, Professor Kysar has published several chapters in edited volumes, including one analyzing the implications of cognitive and social psychology for the understanding and regulation of tobacco products and one exploring the possibilities and limitations of neoclassical economics as a model for legal analysis. He is presently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity, which examines certain underappreciated moral and political assumptions that underlay invocation of cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle within intergenerational policymaking contexts.  He co-authored two casebooks on environmental law, to be published by Elgar and Island Press, as well.

Professor Kysar graduated magna cum laude in 1998 from Harvard Law School, where he received the Sears Prize and was a member of the Board of Student Advisors. Two of his articles have been selected as the top environmental law submission to the annual Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum.