Wells Environmental Law Clinic marks 30 years of impact in the community
The Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic was born from a simple idea. In 1994, lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense Council along with philanthropist Dan Emmett approached UCLA School of Law. What if, they asked, the law school created a legal clinic where students could work outside of the classroom on behalf of community groups to help enforce environmental laws?
“The idea was that students would represent Santa Monica Baykeeper in cases under the Clean Water Act,” recalls Ann Carlson, who was the founding director of the clinic. Carlson is the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at UCLA Law, where she is a faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, which houses the clinic. That first class worked with NRDC and Santa Monica Baykeeper (now known as Los Angeles Waterkeeper) on a case against the California Department of Transportation over stormwater pollution caused by vehicles.
Surprisingly, the case went to trial. “Our students got to prepare a number of the witnesses who testified in front of the judge,” Carlson says. “It resulted in a very big settlement with the Department of Transportation that required it to implement all sorts of measures to clean up the contribution that the roads and highways were making to stormwater pollution.”
The class gained experience working with real clients while solving actual environmental problems. That has been a winning formula for the last 30 years for the clinic, which was named to honor Wells, a lawyer, entertainment executive and avid environmentalist.
“When this clinic started, the environmental law field was really burgeoning,” says Cara Horowitz, who directs the clinic and serves as the executive director of the Emmett Institute. “Some of the early big environmental statutes in the United States were passed around 1970, so they'd been around for a couple of decades already. But advocates were beginning to feel their way through the use of these statutes in ways that were becoming very meaningful.”
Much has changed over these three decades, as climate change has moved front-and-center for policymakers — and for students. In the early 1990s, only one or two UCLA Law students each year would express interest in an environmental career, Carlson says. Now, UCLA’s environmental law specialization graduates 25 to 30 students per year.
Students in the Wells Clinic work on pressing environmental matters at the local, national and international levels. Over the years, students have provided analysis underscoring the legal basis for L.A. County to phase out oil and gas operations; drafted successful petitions to enforce air monitoring near oil refineries; successfully challenged the grant of a permit for coal mining on Native American lands in Arizona on behalf of Hopi tribal members; and worked through the United Nations on behalf of small island states fighting for aggressive international climate change action.
Divya Rao ’21, a managing associate in energy, transportation and infrastructure at Sidley Austin, participated in the clinic in 2018 and worked with Surfrider Foundation. Her project was to put together a briefing booklet for Congress on single-use plastics to help advocate for potential legislation that would aim to reduce plastic pollution. That work sent her to Washington, where she made a presentation to Congress and experienced national politics firsthand.
There was a blizzard on the day that Rao and her clinic team touched down. The 2018 midterms had just handed Democrats control of the House of Representatives. Members of Congress were facing off over a government shutdown, but the students got to work.
“We actually had a panel with Rep. Alan Lowenthal, where we were speaking to a group of staffers and representatives about our conclusions and what we thought the best solution would be,” Rao says. “I thought it was so empowering to be able to, as a law student, speak about something that I'd spent a full semester focusing on and becoming really passionate about and presenting those findings with the hope that that legislation might pass and help Americans across the country.”
The bill that her work inspired, the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, is still under consideration and has gained more support as attention to plastic pollution has only grown.
In the decades since the clinic’s founding, many other environmental law programs around the country have followed suit. But there’s something special about operating an environmental law clinic in Los Angeles, Horowitz says. One of the world’s great megacities, L.A. is home to myriad environmental problems but also a lively environmental justice community. The clinic has worked for years with communities in South L.A. and environmental justice advocates fighting lead pollution. Other clinic partners throughout the state have included groups focused on air pollution.
Ben Harris ’16 says that he enrolled in the Wells Clinic during his last semester to ensure that he didn't leave law school without practical experience in environmental justice. He worked on a motion in a California Energy Commission proceeding related to a power plant in Oxnard that was affecting local air quality.
“It was the first time I really was exposed not just to some of the concepts underlying environmental justice and environmental racism but also to communities themselves expressing desires for what they want to see to improve their own communities and environment,” Harris says. “It really was meaningful to me to be able to support the community in having their own voice in the matter.”
Harris went on to become a law fellow at the Emmett Institute and co-teach the clinic. He is now a senior staff attorney for Los Angeles Waterkeeper — yes, the very first organization that partnered with the Wells Clinic 30 years ago.