Challenges to environmental law.

• Author: Leshy, John D.

It is altogether fitting to be extolling the distinguished record of the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College in the development and application of law related to natural resources and the environment. I am familiar with the field and Lewis & Clark's record in it because I am a recovering natural resources law professor. It would be fair to say that I am temporarily in detox because I am still on leave from the law faculty at Arizona State University.

Opinion polls consistently report that most lawyers practicing today are unhappy, making comfortable incomes but lacking psychic reward. By and large, this is not true of those practicing in the environmental and natural resources field. I am fortunate to be able to say, "I love my job." Indeed, I am fired with enthusiasm about my work. Clark Kerr, as Chancellor of the University of California system back in the days when people were occupying buildings, said that he too came to work fired with enthusiasm--and left that job the same way.

The most succinct description of my job is that I am supposed to keep the Secretary of the Interior out of jail. As some of you know, oil portraits of past Secretaries line the central hall of the sixth floor of the main Interior building in Washington, D.C. The first thing I did when I became Solicitor was to get the Secretary's permission to move one of the portraits into my office. Students of Interior lore will, of course, guess which one--Albert Bacon Fall, a former Senator from New Mexico and President Harding's Secretary of the Interior from 1921 to 1923. Fall was aptly named; he was the fall guy in the Teapot Dome Scandal and did hard time for bribery, so I figure it is appropriately sobering that the Solicitor's most notable failure is on the wall scowling down at me. By the way, Secretary Fall's fate holds another lesson for the importance of good legal representation: Fall was convicted of taking the bribe that the oil company executive was acquitted of giving.(1)

Speaking of quality lawyering and the importance of good training brings me back to tonight's occasion--Lewis & Clark's Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program. It trains outstanding attorneys. Several attorneys now in the Solicitor's office have graduated from the program and a number of other graduates have worked in our office at one time or another. Many other agencies in the federal establishment, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, have likewise benefitted. But the program produces much more than topnotch students. It is one of the two law schools in the country which regularly train federal judges in environmental law, and its faculty produces much valuable scholarship and public service.

The program's law journal, Environmental Law, is a bible in this field. I can speak of its very high standards from personal experience, because after twenty years of trying, I have an article in an upcoming issue, a little piece defending the Clinton Administration's natural resources policy.(2) A list of articles and authors over the last five years provides a flavor of this journal's importance. Consider some of the people who have published articles in this journal just since 1989. There are the usual suspects, like Joe Sax(3) and Charles Wilkinson,(4) but also people like Senator Mark Hatfield,(5) former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchen,(6) Senator Joe Biden,(7) former EPA Administrator Bill...