West Coast Environmental Law is proud to have recently partnered with the UBC Faculty of Law, among the largest and most respected law programs in Canada, to offer law students an “Environmental Law Workshop”.  This new program offers students academic credit for practical experience gained working directly with our environmental lawyers.

Seven second and third year UBC students are currently working at our offices for a number of hours each week, as well as conducting further research on their own time.  While on this clinical term the students undertake work developed by West Coast to reflect current environmental law issues; as such, the research undertaken by the students is relevant and applied to West Coast’s environmental law reform work.

Although there are other university programs offering clinical students clinical environmental law experience, the Workshop is the first in Canada to focus on reforming and strengthening environmental laws.  Student assignments are graded by former West Coast Staffer, Mark Haddock, now adjunct faculty at UBC, for academic credit. 

In turn, West Coast lawyers train law students on how to develop a firm grounding in a variety of legal and policy issues related to environmental enhancement and protection and to identify and pursue opportunities to change environmental law and policy for the better. Through the opportunity to work directly with leading environmental lawyers, students may start to consider a career in public interest environmental law (an under-represented field in the legal profession). In addition to building their skills they are also building networks to make them better environmental lawyers upon graduation.

West Coast believes that the best way to protect the environment is through the law. Although our organization does not receive funding through this partnership with UBC law faculty and students, the students increase our capacity, as a small group of non-profit environmental lawyers, to achieve environmental law reform. We contribute organizational time to train and supervise the students, because we want to help develop and build the next generation of public interest environmental lawyers, from which all Canadians will benefit.

Interested in hearing from the students themselves?  One of their assignment is to write a blog post for submission to our Environmental Law Alert.  So far we have posted:

• Environmental Assessment 2.0 by Douglas Schoch;
• Saying No to Chemical Trespass by Rachel Barksy.

We’ll be posting more student posts in the coming weeks so check back.