School Notes: Yale Law School
March/April 2010

Law School mourns pioneer in clinical education

Yale Law School professor emeritus Daniel J. Freed ’48, ’51LLB, a pioneer in the criminal justice process and a key figure in the development of clinical education at the Law School, died January 17 at age 82. Freed was clinical professor emeritus of law and its administration, specializing in sentencing and criminal justice administration. He spent ten years at the U.S. Department of Justice before coming to Yale Law School in 1969 to oversee the development of the school’s clinical program. He was one of the early proponents of sentencing guidelines and, in 1989, cofounded the Federal Sentencing Reporter, a law review dedicated to accessible conversation about sentencing law and policy among scholars, judges, practitioners, and policymakers. “Dan Freed was a unique scholar, reformer, and social activist,” said Yale Law School dean Robert Post ’77JD. “He spent a lifetime seeking to realize his goal of making the criminal justice system fairer and more effective, and he succeeded to a remarkable degree.”

Iceland tops rankings in environmental performance

Iceland leads the world in addressing pollution control and natural resource management challenges, according to the 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), produced by environmental experts at Yale and Columbia University. First released in 2006, the index measures the environmental performance of various countries based on established targets. A total of 163 countries were ranked on their performance across 25 metrics aggregated into ten categories, including: environmental health, air quality, water resource management, biodiversity and habitat, forestry, fisheries, agriculture, and climate change. The United States placed 61st, with strong results on some issues, such as provision of safe drinking water and forest sustainability, and weak performance on other issues, including greenhouse gas emissions and several aspects of local air pollution.

The EPI was developed by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, a joint initiative of Yale Law School and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

“At the Copenhagen Climate Conference, reliable environmental performance data emerged as fundamental to global-scale policy cooperation,” said Daniel C. Esty ’86JD, director of the center. “The 2010 EPI shows the potential for a much more analytically rigorous approach to environmental decision-making.”

The full text of the 2010 EPI report, including country profiles and the summary for policymakers, is available at http://epi.yale.edu. For another report on the EPI, see the environment school notes.