Making Climate Lawyers

Kimberly K. Smith is professor of environmental studies emerita at Carleton College and the author of The Conservation Constitution: The Conservation Movement and Constitutional Change, 1870–1930, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, and Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace.

• PrefaceIntroduction1. Making Environmental Lawyers2. The Birth of Climate Law3. The Changing Landscape4. The Great Transformation, 2000–20105. Making Climate Lawyers, 2011–2020ConclusionAppendixA: List of People InterviewedAppendix B: Law School of Environment-Focused CentersNotesBibliographyIndex

"Kimberly Smith’s Making Climate Lawyers offers a unique perspective of the role American legal education played in shaping climate policy. The ongoing transformation in law schools in studying climate change has generated the legal expertise necessary to structure an effective climate policy. This is a fascinating and untold study of the outsize role US lawyers possess in framing, shaping, and structuring public policy, including climate policy, a role American law schools are central in developing."—Michael S. Ariens, author of The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Lawyer Ethics"Making Climate Lawyers shows how the climate change crisis and potential solutions come from the roots of the American political and governance establishment—law schools. Kimberly Smith explains with research and insights how lawyers make policy in the United States and lawyers are shaped by law school. The advances in legal education that Smith shares and the bold further recommendations she offers would help transform the law to meet the challenges of climate change."—Noah Hall, author of Water Law: Concepts and Insights"If the warning signs of harmful climate change were flashing as early as the 1980s, why did it take so long for law schools to notice, and even longer to offer courses in the legal tools for addressing climate change? This necessary book shows that law schools and law professors struggled mightily to understand and translate a novel environmental problem into useful training for future lawyers. Through careful research, Smith provides a probing, evenhanded primer on why good change took so long to come to law schools. Smith pushes law schools to take her account seriously: the need for a dynamic and innovative field of climate law, she suggests, can be an impetus for much-needed reform in law schools more generally. This book is essential reading for anyone wondering how law schools can do more, and do better, to address the most far-reaching environmental challenge of our era."—Todd A. Wildermuth, coauthor of Wildlife Law, Second Edition