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Abstract:
Environmental justice disputes arise at the international, national and local levels. Disputes at the international level include allegations that multi-national corporations are exploiting indigenous peoples and the impoverished conditions of developing nations. At the national level, although an overwhelming number of studies show disparate impacts on peoples of color and lower-incomes, debate continues about the strength of that evidence and the appropriate political and legal responses to such disparities. At the local level, many people of color and lower-income communities believe they have not been treated fairly regarding the distribution of the benefits and burdens of environmental protection.

Over the past decade during which communities, academics, regulated firms, and government officials have struggled with these issues of the relationship of environmental quality to race and class, the quest to explain the problems underlying environmental justice disputes has resulted in the use of varying terminology and definitions. To better understand the essence and breadth of environmental justice concerns, this article sets forth a four-part categorization of environmental justice issues: 1) distributive justice; 2) procedural justice; 3) corrective justice; and 4) social justice. This taxonomy offers a method of collapsing the seemingly broad scope of environmental justice and identifying common causes of and solutions to environmental injustice.

environmental justice, environmental law, distributive justice, social justice

Abstract:
Although clinical legal education is an established part of American legal education, few commentators have considered how the ethical issues governing lawyers' conflicts of interest and competency apply in the law school clinic context. This article fills that gap by identifying and explaining the ethical obligations law clinic students and supervising clinical faculty encounter in case and client selection due to conflict of interest and competency considerations. It analyzes various conflicts of interest due to prior, current, or future employment of law clinic students and faculty, and it explores conflicts based on the status of clinical faculty as employees of the law school and university. The article also discusses the components of effective conflict-checking systems, and suggests model conflict-checking procedures. Additionally, the article considers the duty of competence owed to law school clinic clients, clinical faculty's ethical duties to clients, and issues of adequate assistance of counsel in criminal cases handled by law school clinic students. The article concludes that in spite of the burdens that greater focus on conflicts of interest and competence issues might impose on law school clinic programs, clinic students, faculty, and clients will benefit from such efforts.

Abstract:
Law school clinics play an important role in training future lawyers and in providing legal assistance to traditionally under-represented individuals and groups. In addition to facing the legal issues present in any law practice, law clinic students and faculty are often confronted with ethical issues that lawyers representing poor and unpopular clients sometimes face - outside interference in case and client selection. This article explores the ethical considerations raised by interference in law school clinic case and client selection and limitations on the means of representation lawyers may employ in representing their clients. The article's analysis provides a useful framework for responding to interference with not just law school clinics, but also with legal services lawyers, public defenders, and private practitioners representing poor and unpopular clients and causes.

Abstract:
The value of clinical legal education courses and the faculty teaching those courses has long been contested. A focal point for this opposition has been resistance to the American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation standard that requires law schools to establish long-term employment relationships with clinical faculty and provide them with a meaningful voice in law school governance. By integrating clinical faculty into law schools, the ABA aims to advance the value of clinical legal education and the professional skills and values it promotes. In the decades since the ABA created the first clinical faculty standard, clinical legal education in the United States has developed as pedagogy and the number of clinical faculty has greatly increased. Despite these trends, a recent decision by the ABA Accreditation Committee approving short-term contracts and the denial of meaningful participation in faculty governance for clinical faculty demonstrates that the debate over the appropriate status continues. In this debate, there is often little or no mention of the history of the accreditation standard in question, perhaps because no historical account of its evolution exists. In this article, the authors fill that gap in the literature by tracing the evolution of the ABA standard concerning clinical faculty status.

The article begins with a discussion of the role of the ABA in legal education and a brief history of the development of clinical legal education. It then discusses the events leading up to the initial adoption in 1984 of a standard addressing clinical faculty and to the strengthening of the standard in 1996. The authors conclude by addressing changes to the standard in 2005 and how those changes have revived the debate over the status of clinical faculty. By surfacing the historical debates and the evolution of the standard for clinical faculty, the article provides the basis for reasoned, informed decisions by the ABA and the legal academy concerning the value of clinical legal education and the role of clinical faculty in law schools.

American Bar Association (ABA), legal education, law schools, ABA Standards, clinical legal education, academic freedom, tenure

Abstract:
The ideals of the legal profession include a commitment to providing legal representation to those unable to pay. Yet in a number of situations, court and bar association programs have denied free legal assistance to unpopular clients or causes or have restricted attorneys for the poor from using the same legal tools that are available to attorneys representing private clients.

This article examines the complicity of lawyers in restricting the availability of legal assistance to low-income people. It examines the restrictions imposed by Congress on the availability of free legal assistance to the poor and chronicles the role the legal profession has played in imposing similar restrictions on lawyer-financed or sponsored legal assistance programs. The article considers the ethical implications of the legal profession's role in restricting access to legal representation and concludes that attorneys, judges, and bar organizations must consider the extent to which their programs and policies restrict the ability of some unpopular clients and causes to gain access to representation and must work to remove these restrictions.

access to justice, pro bono, legal ethics

Abstract:
Science plays a central role in ensuring that environmental laws and regulations are protective of human health and the environment. This article chronicles many instances where environmental scientists were fired or otherwise attacked because employers or others were disturbed by the results of their research or professional opinions. The article surveys the legal protections available to scientists when disputes over scientific speech arise and concludes that additional protections are needed to ensure that scientists are free to present their findings without fear or retribution.

environmental science, scientific speech, suppression

Abstract:
As the role of science in resolving environmental policy disputes increases in importance, attacks on scientists as a means of suppressing unwanted environmental scientific research also appear to be increasing. This article documents the scope and methods of suppression of environmental scientists, describing both surveys of scientists and anecdotal evidence. It then examines some of the laws relating to suppression of environmental science, in particular laws relating to defamation, research misconduct, and employer retaliation. The article analyzes both the ways laws are used to suppress scientific speech and the ways they may be used to protect and promote such speech. The article concludes that greater efforts, including the support of institutions and professional societies, are necessary to deter the suppression of environmental science.

environmental science, environmental speech, suppression

Abstract:
As lawyers and members of a profession dedicated to equal justice under law and public service, many law professors have stepped out of the classroom and out of traditional academic scholarship to address perceived injustices in society through efforts such as pro bono litigation and legislative drafting. However, the amount of legally-related public service work by law professors is thought to be quite modest. This article analyzes the normative bases for the rights and duties of law professors to speak out on issues of public concern. It addresses laws that affect the right of a law professor to participate in out of the classroom, or extramural, activities, the legal profession's established precepts on the rights and duties of a lawyer to perform public service, and the legal academy's views of public service. The article concludes that although there are established rights and duties of a law professor to speak out, the legal academy should do more to encourage and assist the public service activities of law professors.

law professors, legal education, speech, academic freedom

Abstract:
Although there is considerable scholarship about a lawyer's duty to represent repugnant clients and about the moral nonaccountability of lawyers for the deeds of their clients, there has been limited discussion of attacks by attorneys on those who represent unpopular or controversial clients, and even less analyzing the ethics of such attacks. Articles on the ethics of environmental law practice make no more than passing reference to a lawyer's duty to respect the need for all points of view to be heard, and make no attempt to analyze the role of attorneys in attacks on providers of environmental representation. This article documents and challenges the propriety of attacks by attorneys on other lawyers providing environmental representation. The article begins by identifying some of the attacks and the justifications often given for such assaults. Because the attorneys making such attacks and others who have supported these tactics appear not to have considered the propriety of their behavior, the article then analyzes the legal ethics of such attacks by focusing on the formal rules of professional conduct. The article concludes by setting forth proposals for amending rules of professional conduct and law school policies to deter attacks on providers of environmental representation.

legal ethics; environmental representation; professional conduct; attacks

Abstract:
The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such as politicians or business interests attempting to pressure universities and law schools not to represent or to abandon the representation of some clients. Conversely, internal intrusions on law clinic lawyering, usually by university or law school administrators seeking to influence whether and how clinical faculty and students represent some clients, have not been well-publicized. Consequently, there is virtually no scholarly attention to the tension between the individual lawyer-professor's academic freedom and professional responsibility to clients and the law school's decision-making authority.

The authors are motivated to write this article because of some of the more egregious instances of interference on lawyering in the academy, which include the firing of two clinical faculty members for their involvement in a civil rights case, pressure by university administrators on clinical faculty to avoid taking on potentially controversial cases, and a law school deans forcing the clinic to withdraw from client representation or to limit the types of remedies sought for clinic clients. In these instances, the interference with the faculty representation of clients as part of their teaching was not motivated by educational or professional responsibility concerns but, apparently, to mollify critics of the faculty member.

Against this backdrop, this article considers how the practice of law in the legal academy is both similar to and different from the typical practice of law in a firm or public interest organization and the teaching that law faculty do in the classroom. The authors focus in particular on how notions of academic freedom apply to professors lawyering in the academy and how the professional responsibilities of attorney-professors influence their teaching pursuits and relationships with the dean, other faculty members, and the university administration.

The article focuses on two underlying questions. First, how much discretion should individual faculty have in selecting cases for their courses? Second, once a faculty member undertakes to represent a client within a course, should a dean, clinical program director, or other person not involved in the client’s representation be able to direct the faculty member's decisions on how to handle the matter? In the process of addressing these issues, we suggest an approach that seeks to be true to the professional rights and responsibilities of law faculty both as academics and attorneys.

academic freedom, academy, autonomy, clinic, clinical education, discretion, ethics, faculty governance, freedom in the classroom, interference in clinical programs, internal interference, law clinic, practicing law within law schools, professional responsibility, restrictions on clinics

Abstract:
Environmental Enforcement: Cases and Materials is the first casebook devoted exclusively to environmental enforcement issues. For use in a specialized course or seminar or as a supplement to existing survey courses, the book introduces future lawyers to the full range of legal issues and practical challenges they will face when handling environmental enforcement cases.

The book begins with an examination of the theories underlying the various models of environmental enforcement and the appropriate roles of the federal and state governments in enforcement. It then contains chapters on government investigative authorities and administrative, civil, criminal, and citizen enforcement. There also is a lengthy chapter devoted to the specialized issues arising in Superfund enforcement. The book then examines the burgeoning area of compliance incentives and assistance programs and also discusses alternative enforcement strategies, such as permit bars, public spotlighting techniques, and common law theories.

environment, enforcement, environmental law, environmental enforcement