Around the Schools: Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is losing a faculty member to the federal government, even as it regains one.

Laurence Tribe ’66, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, has been named senior counselor for access to justice in the Department of Justice, and he will lead an initiative aimed at improving access to civil and criminal legal services.

Justice Department officials say they hope the initiative will elevate the importance of legal access issues and help prompt concrete steps to address them. The primary focus of the initiative will be to improve indigent defense, enhance the delivery of legal services to the poor and middle class, and identify and promote alternatives to court-intensive and lawyer-intensive solutions.

In another development, Jody Freeman returns to the School’s faculty this month, after serving in the White House as counselor for energy and climate change for more than a year.

Freeman, a leading scholar of administrative and environmental law, will be appointed to an endowed chair in public law named for former Solicitor General and Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox Jr. She will work at the School and across the University to harness Harvard’s talents and resources toward shaping global energy policy. The professor will also resume her role as director of the School’s Environmental Law Program, which she founded in 2006.

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