Frank Wells Environmental Law Clinic

The School of Law's Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic offers excellent opportunities for students to obtain hands-on experience in environmental law. Working with many nonprofit and government agency partners, the clinic has been very successful at training environmental lawyers while helping to protect the environment. Students who take the six-unit environmental law clinical course work on large and small cases, involving both federal and state law. The clinic has focused on teaching students conceptual frameworks or models that support particular lawyering skills, while at the same time exposing students to real-world environmental law practice through intensive work on particular environmental issues. In this way, the clinic trains the next generation of environmental lawyers.

Recent Wells Clinic Work

The clinic filed an amicus curiae brief in an important case currently pending before the California Supreme Court, Save Tara v. City of West Hollywood. The clinic's brief supports the position that a city must conduct environmental review of a development project before making decisions that might limit the alternatives and mitigation measures that the city would have available to reduce or eliminate the project's environmental impacts.

In 2007 and early 2008, Wells Clinic students and faculty worked on several other important projects, including:

working with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity to analyze the ways in which governments must take into account anticipated greenhouse gas emissions when they conduct environmental reviews of plans and projects.
contributing to a challenge by Sierra Club in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal of a U.S. EPA rule governing chemical emissions from dry cleaners.
assisting the Center for Biological Diversity in a successful effort to designate critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act for several endangered plant species in southern California.
assisting the California Air Resources Board in analyzing potential rules limiting diesel emissions.
conducting legal and factual research to helpe the Sierra Club to battle mountaintop coal mining in Virginia.

UCLA Environmental Law Clinic students travel to the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast to provide legal services: in the spring of 2007, clinic students under the direction of Professor Tim Malloy and assisting instructor Ethan Elkind have been working with a Mississippi Sierra Club chapter to evaluate and provide comments for a proposed Chevron refinery expansion permit. As part of the trip to the gulf coast, the students participated in a public hearing on the proposed permit in front of Mississippi regulators, local officials and members of the public.

In 2006, clinic students under Sean Hecht's supervision drafted an analysis of the extent to which City of Santa Monica retains power to regulate the operations of Santa Monica Municipal Airport to protect air quality in the face of federal preemption. This analysis, prepared for City of Los Angeles Councilmember Bill Rosendahl and presented to City officials, concludes that the City likely has some authority to regulate airport operations in order to protect public health and safety.

Clinic students in 2006 also submitted comments on a draft permit for the Exide secondary lead smelting plant in the City of Vernon, a facility that affects low-income communities nearby including the densely-packed City of Maywood, which is located only a short distance from the plant.

During spring 2005, the clinic’s primary project involved representing Sandy Steers, who is affiliated with an environmental organization in the San Bernardino Mountains that has succeeded in halting a development in the Big Bear Lake Area. Sandy was named as a defendant in a lawsuit aimed at attacking her right to petition the government and aimed at intimidating others who attempt to prevent projects from being developed without proper environmental review. The dismissal of the case in April resulted in a published federal district court opinion in the case Marina Point Development Associates v. United States et al., in which the court articulated that providing information to an administrative agency in support of a particular result, as our client is alleged to have done, is conduct protected by the First Amendment. The Clinic, under the direction of Sean Hecht and Adam Wolf, was one of two lead counsel in her defense against the frivolous lawsuit. Students found this to be an excellent case for learning the nuts and bolts of litigation, as we conducted research in support of our the motion to dismiss the case, working with co-counsel and our clients on an issue of significance for many Californians. The case was covered widely in the Los Angeles Times and other media (with the Times writing an editorial on our side of the case), and the California Attorney General’s Office filed a friend of the court brief on our side of the case. The UCLA Law Magazine published an article discussing the case.

Clinic Faculty
The clinic is currently taught by professors Sean Hecht and Katherine Trisolini, and has been taught recently by professors Timothy Malloy, Ann Carlson, and Ethan Elkind.

Wells Clinic Client Links

Santa Monica BayKeeper
Natural Resources Defense Council
Environmental Defense
Environmental Defense Center
Sierra Club
California Environmental Rights Alliance
California Communities Against Toxics
Endangered Habitats League
Communities for a Better Environment
Center for Biological Diversity
Santa Barbara ChannelKeeper

For additional links to environmental websites, click here.