Student Opportunities in Environmental Law

Carolina Law provides many benefits for students interested in pursuing studies in environmental law. The School offers a range of core and specialty classes, and has a cadre of cutting edge classes such as Carbon Trading and Climate Change law. A class in Interagency Environmental Cooperation allows students to work on real environmental issues in administrative agencies with the agency personnel themselves.  Through a joint agreement with Duke Law School, UNC students can take specilaty environmental law classes offered at Duke, if they are not available at UNC.  We also have semester long externships in Washington D.C. and around the country that are associated with environmental agencies and public interest law firms such as the Southern Environmental Law Center. Additionally, CLEAR provides environmental law students with opportunities to conduct paid research on some of the most important environmental law issues of the day, and is linked with other environmental disciplines across campus and environmental projects around the country.

Students interested in environmental law can also join the student-run Environmental Law Project, which not only brings together students interested in environmental law, but also undertakes recycling projects and works with the environmental law faculty to publish pieces in the materials accompanying the state of North Carolina's largest environmental law CLE.

Additionally, UNC students interested in environmental law can also join the Weatherization Working Group, a pro bono project run by students and Professor Maria Savasta-Kennedy working with the town of Chapel Hill to design a program to weatherize the town's low income public housing.  Eventually, the group hopes to design a prototype weatherization program for small towns across the country.  Moreover, this to be one of several projects providing students with the opportunity to apply their classroom experience to real world environmental problems, particularly those problems with climate change adaptation, that are the focus of CLEAR. 

Finally, the Triangle area is home to law firms with environmental law specialties, environmental public interest firms, state environmental agencies, and the US EPA's national air research laboratory.