Advancing Environmental Law At Pace: A Personal Memoir, A Continuing Challenge

How did an unaccredited law school, admitting its first students in 1976, become renowned as a national and international leader in environmental education in less than three decades? What did Pace have to attract some of America’s brightest and best college graduates to pursue their careers in environmental law in White Plains? Why did Yale Law School’s Dean Anthony Kronman, in 1999, call Pace’s program one to which “other law schools look with admiration and envy…one of the best in the country, indeed the world…” Each generation of alumni intimately knows the answer to these questions, but through the lenses of their own student years. Like runners in a relay race, every three years since 1978, students and professors and staff built one of the world’s premier programs in environmental legal education. At graduation, each cohort of law students passes the responsibility on to the next cohort of students. Alumni are related to their law school forever, but, curious about what went to build environmental legal education at Pace in the 27 years when they were not students, they have asked me to tell the story. Here goes