Public Interest Environmental Lawyering

 

 Today I attended a panel discussion on environmental lawyering. Panel participants include Professor Dean Hill Rivkin of The University of Tennessee College of Law, Stephanie Kodish of the National Parks Conservation Association, Stephanie Matheny of the Tennessee Clean Water Network, Sam Evans of the Southern Environmental Law Center, and Mary Cromer of the Appalachian Citizens Law Center.  The lawyers discussed various things about their jobs including: What do you do? Where does your job fit into the greater scheme of sustainability? Why do you do what you do? What are the rewards and Challenges? How do science and data fit in? and What animates your work? While these answers were intriguing, I found the two most interesting things to be the amount of public interest environmental lawyers and the overall purpose of public interest environmental lawyers. Currently there are only around 750 public interest environmental lawyers in the United States compared to the nearly 25,000 corporate lawyers. This statistic means it is incredibly difficult for public interest environmental lawyers to fight against big business. Additionally, since there are so few public interest environmental lawyers, the lawyers have to be extremely selective about the cases they take and cannot effectively defend the entirety of the public interest. This leads to many companies getting away with violations against government policies such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Public interest environmental lawyers can be called the great internalizes. Their work forces companies that pollute to internalize the costs associated with the external effects of their pollution. These companies now factor in externalities when making decisions. Public interest environmental law seems like an interesting and expanding field for upcoming lawyers.