Tomorrow’s Advocates Clerkship Program

Tomorrow’s Advocates enables select Lewis & Clark law students to work full time with PEAC during the summer months. Made possible with the generous support of the Lazar Foundation, the program provides significant benefits to students, PEAC and our clients:

• Students working with PEAC during the summer gain experience in public interest environmental litigation and advocacy though concentrated training and mentoring, client interaction, and intensive legal research and drafting.
• Financial need and lack of paid positions in public interest environmental law often force committed students to seek other types of employment. Tomorrow’s Advocates thus enables some of the “best and brightest” environmental law students to follow their passion by working with - while learning from - PEAC to protect and improve the environment, throughout the summer and beyond. The experience gained, and contacts and relationships developed with PEAC clients and partners, often enable our clerks to find employment in the public interest environmental community after graduation.
• PEAC’s ability to serve our clients is enhanced by our clerkship program. During the school year, law students working with PEAC for credit help us to create one of the nation’s largest and most effective environmental law clinics. PEAC’s full time summer clerks ensure the clinic’s capacity throughout the year.
• The public interest environmental community, including PEAC clients and partners, reaps benefits from increasing the pool of law school graduates with substantial real-world experience and training. PEAC students and clerks are, literally, tomorrow’s advocates for the environment. Many of our alums and past clerks now lead the charge in working to improve and protect our natural surroundings as attorneys in public interest, government, and private practice.

2010 Law Clerks

John Krallman

John is a third-year law student who served as a coordinator for the Air Group at both the Northwest Environmental Defense Center (NEDC) and Environmental Justice Advocates (EJA) last year.  John has also acted as the Treasurer for the Lewis & Clark Chapter of the American Constitution Society (ACS) for the past two years.  John was a member of the moot court team that took first place at this year’s National Environmental Moot Court Competition at Pace Law School, marking the third consecutive and seventh time in the last seventeen years that Lewis & Clark has won the competition. A graduate of Virginia Tech with degrees in Chemical Engineering (B.S. 2005) and Chemistry (B.A. 2005), John specializes in work under the Clean Air Act.  John has been assisting in the litigation against Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant and working with Portland neighborhood groups to address air toxics.

Sarah Kutil

Sarah is in her fourth year of law school, made possible by Lewis & Clark’s evening program, which allows her to work by day and attend classes by night.  In addition to working at PEAC, Sarah moonlights at a construction defect firm, and is the co-author of a forthcoming nutshell on animal law.  She is also the author of a paper on incorporating scientific certainty requirements in marine fisheries management, forthcoming in the 2010–2011 Environmental Law Review.  While at PEAC, Sarah has been able to work on cases involving the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Natural Gas Act, the Endangered Species Act, and even the Rivers and Harbors Act.  Sarah hopes to apply lessons learned from these and other highly varied experiences to work related to marine resource policy and management.

Amy van Saun

Amy is a third year law student at Lewis & Clark, currently serving as President of the Public Interest Law Project (PILP).  Amy also volunteers as a Project Coordinator for the Sustainable Agriculture and Pesticide Policy group of the Northwest Environmental Defense Center (NEDC).  As a PILP stipend recipient, Amy worked last summer as a law clerk for the Center for Food Safety, which works to protect human health and the environment by curbing the proliferation of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture.  Amy has worked on several NEPA claims related to invasive species in the Pacific Northwest, as well as claims under the Clean Air Act with regard to coal-fired power plants.  In her limited spare time, Amy loves listening to music and playing guitar, as well as amateur urban farming and baking. 

Ashley MacKenzie

 Ashley is a third-year law student pursuing the Environmental Law Certificate and is a recipient of both the Steven Manas and Dean’s Scholarships.  She serves as the Director of the Sustainability Audit Initiative, where she assisted in establishing a composting program and a comprehensive paper use policy for the law school.  She also enjoys serving as a Board Member for the Women’s Law Caucus.  As graduate of Northern Arizona University (B. S. 2007) in Environmental Science, Ashley was the recipient of EPA’s Greater Research Opportunity Fellowship, and interned at EPA Region 9 prior to attending law school.  Last summer and school year, Ashley clerked for the Oregon Department of Justice within the Natural Resources Section of General Counsel.  While at PEAC, Ashley has worked on several cases arising under the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act, including those related to regional habitat conservation plans, Oregon’s water quality standards, licensing of liquefied natural gas terminals, and bald eagle delisting.