LAWS6812 · Law

Environmental Lawyering: Practice for Sustainability

Boston College Law School

This course aims at 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. Students learn about integrating sustainability and other environmental considerations into designing internal management systems to enhance clients value while 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 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. 3 credits, based on two in-class group exercises and a final paper addressing a transactional subject that should double as a job search writing sample. The course may be taken on a pass/fail basis. 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, including 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, I will have office hours to discuss the course, review drafts of the final paper, and/or help with job searches/professional networking.