Yale Law Report Profiles Mark Templeton, Director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic
Leading the Charge
Working in the public and private sectors, Yale Law School graduates keep the faith in the fight against climate change.
A Multiplicity of Strategies
Stepping in when regulators are unable or unwilling to enforce even existing laws is a fundamental part of environmental advocacy, says Mark N. Templeton ’99, director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School.
“I want to affirm the idea that we need a multiplicity of strategies,” Templeton says. “Policy proposals. Rulemaking. Collaborative approaches. I support all of those. But sometimes you need to carry a big stick.”
Enforcement agencies such as the EPA don’t have the resources to bring every case that needs to be brought, even when they have the best intentions, he says, and environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, were designed to allow citizens to sue.
“Congress recognized that sometimes enforcement agencies may not always do their job,” he says. “We have made a lot of progress on some of the most obvious and most egregious environmental issues. We pretty much don’t have rivers catching on fire anymore. But we’ve gotten hung up on the problems that are more complicated to solve.”
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