A Broader Grasp of Environmental Law
A recent Law School panel on the Flint water crisis was so popular that even with extra chairs, some people still had to sit on the floor. It was a testament, perhaps, to the widespread concern over the public health emergency and failure of governance that has garnered extensive media coverage over the last year.
It also emphasized the impact that both the Law School’s clinics and its public interest fellowships can have on a new graduate’s career.
Evan Feinauer, ’15, who spoke on the panel, received one of the Law School’s Postgraduate Public Interest Law Fellowships to work as an attorney with the national litigation team in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Chicago office. The water crisis in Flint—which arose from a cost-cutting change in the city’s water source that resulted in lead-contaminated drinking water—is a complex case of government failure, poverty, and public health. Feinauer, armed with his experience in the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, was prepared to tackle it.
“A few months out of law school, Evan is near the center of one of the most important public health and environmental justice issues in the country,” said Mark Templeton, Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Abrams Clinic. Templeton, who moderated the discussion, hoped that the panel would educate the community about Flint, Michigan, and show attendees that “students and recent graduates can play significant roles very early in their careers.”
As a participant in the Abrams Clinic during the 2014-2015 academic year, Feinauer represented a group called Recovery on Water (ROW), which provides breast cancer patients and survivors the opportunity to speed their recovery and build community by rowing on the Chicago River. The project aimed to improve the quality of water in the team’s rowing site.
“It was a really good experience because a number of times since I’ve been here working on the Flint case, I’ve had to distill really complicated ideas down into short summaries,” Feinauer said. “In the clinic, I got feedback on that, which was very helpful.”
This hands-on experience, Templeton added, likely gave Feinauer a perspective that would help him relate to his clients in Flint.
“Working directly with clients has helped Evan develop empathy for the situations that they’re facing, whether it’s the women in ROW, who use Bubbly Creek as part of their recovery, or the people in Flint, who are really aggrieved by the situation there and are seeking appropriate redress,” Templeton said.
As an advocate for ROW, Feinauer met the women enduring the consequences of pollution and worked with students and faculty in the clinic to solve the problem. It was an energizing experience, he said, that helped confirm his dedication to public interest law.
During the panel, which was sponsored by the Kreisman Initiative on Housing Law and Policy, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, the Environmental Law Society, and the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, Feinauer and NRDC attorneys Sarah Tallman and Anjali Waikar discussed the events that led to Flint’s water crisis. Flint’s story, they explained, involved the government’s failure to serve the impoverished, minority majority city and the public health crisis that followed. The NRDC’s lawsuit on behalf of Flint residents was filed against the city and state officials who violated the Safe Drinking Water Act’s requirements for controlling lead contamination.
“The violations are in three buckets,” Feinauer said at the beginning of the panel. “The defendants failed to treat the water to reduce the amount of lead that shows up in the tap water, they failed to properly monitor and test to see if the tap water contained lead, and they inaccurately reported the results of their treatment and monitoring to state regulators.”
All three panelists agreed that the only way to truly address this problem is to get the lead pipes out of the ground. Moreover, Feinauer said, the issue of lead in drinking water is not unique to Flint. Millions of American homes receive water from service pipes that are at least partially made of lead, and contamination will remain possible until all of those pipes are gone.
“Part of our concern is that people aren’t monitoring correctly,” he said. “And if you’re not monitoring correctly, low results could be false negatives. Given how widespread the tactics are to reduce the amount of lead that shows up in tap water samples, there’s reason to be concerned that these problems exist elsewhere and we don’t know.”
Learning the details of the NRDC’s lawsuit, Templeton said, showed current students the far-reaching impact of practicing environmental law.
“Working in environmental law includes addressing public health concerns, as well as protecting and preserving precious natural resources,” Templeton said. “You really get an opportunity, practicing environmental law, to fight for people experiencing the negative effects of pollution in all sorts of contexts.”
Feinauer was able to continue practicing environmental law with the NRDC in part because he earned one of the Law School’s Postgraduate Public Interest Law Fellowships. These competitive fellowships help recent graduates begin their careers in public interest law, where a lack of funding is often an obstacle to hiring people right out of law school.
“This fellowship has allowed me to work with attorneys who are incredible, and on really interesting work that I would not be doing otherwise—I can’t say enough how great it’s been to have this opportunity,” he said. “It’s really given me an amazing first year out of law school.”
Feinauer was grateful for the chance to engage the Law School community in a discussion about the story of Flint and its repercussions. Many of those at the crowded panel were students when he was a 3L, and it was exciting to be around people who would soon be in this next phase of their lives.
“Providing safe drinking water hasn’t always been considered a central environmental issue,” Feinauer said, “but I think people can relate to it more. When we have a broader conception of environmental work and understand the cool stuff the clinic is doing, it will increase interest.”