LAWS 6812 Environmental Lawyering: Practice for Sustainability

This course includes and goes beyond incorporating environmental issues into general legal endeavors to helping students realize the huge potential for meaningful environmental-legal practice made possible by newer concepts in sustainability principles, environmental management and the globalization of our economy. Multi-jurisdictional and international examples are included. American-style liability minimization strategies, brownfields approaches, investment strategies, site assessment and remediation techniques, financial and insurance products are covered, including how they relate to various foreign legal systems and business environments. The teaching style for the course is informal lecture and discussion, supplemented by student simulated client counseling and guest speaker presentations. There are no pre-requisites. The course is 3 credits, based on two in-class group exercises and a transactional document. The course may be taken on a pass/fail basis. Each student will meet individually with Prof. Doliner to review their draft document and discuss its finalization. The transactional document has proven to be a valuable example of practical legal work product that prior students have successfully utilized in their job and internship searches. The course stresses integrating new lawyering and business models that strive to enhance sustainability and other environmental considerations into designing internal management systems to enhance clients value; addressing governmental regulation, liability management, investment strategies, and insurance issues; supervising regulatory audits of clients industrial, research or medical facilities; and due diligence for mergers, acquisitions and other transactions. By engendering skills in working with statutes, regulations, policies, guidance and related administrative procedures while learning principles of U.S. and foreign environmental law in a context of simulated client counseling, students become empowered to integrate these environmental factors into transactional and advocacy practice, whether or not they go on to concentrate in environmental matters. The courses exercises will include a project in a focus area selected with class input. For example, a past years project was a hypothetical U.S. corporate client that engaged the class team to advise and assist it complying with applicable environmental-legal requirements involved in the manufacturing, distribution and sale of medical devices in the European Union. The students selected potential target countries, identifying applicable legal, business and environmental issues. They then made an in-class presentation explaining how they resolved issues such as site acquisition, financing and investment, negotiation of host government location and sustainability incentives, environmental permitting and facility operation. There will also be an optional field trip: see the syllabus. Finally, there will be office hours to discuss the course and/or help with job searches/professional networking.