As a massive oil slick spreads closer to Louisiana’s coastline, state lawmakers are scrambling to line up votes for a bill that would prevent the state’s law-school clinics from suing government agencies or companies that violate pollution laws.
The bill, SB 549, is aimed squarely at Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, which has been a thorn in the side of the state’s chemical and oil industries for more than a decade.
But the legislation, which would prevent all university law clinics that receive state money from challenging government agencies in court, suing individuals for damages, or raising constitutional challenges, would have serious repercussions at the state’s three other law schools: at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Loyola University New Orleans, and Southern University in Baton Rouge. Students in their law clinics would be limited in their ability to represent clients in landlord-tenant disputes, contract-fraud, and other cases.
The four universities would lose all of their state funds if their law clinics violated the proposed law. The bill would also give two legislative committees oversight over law-school clinics.
The law deans at Tulane University and Loyola warned in a letter to state senators last month that the bill would “cripple” the state’s law-school clinics “and deal a serious blow to legal education in our state.”
Similar Challenges
The legislation, which is the subject of fierce lobbying among education and business leaders in Louisiana, is the latest in a series of challenges to law-school clinics around the country. These clinics provide hands-on experience to law students who typically work, under a lawyer’s supervision, on behalf of low-income clients or nonprofit groups.
In Maryland last month, lawmakers narrowly rejected a proposal to withhold state money from the University of Maryland School of Law unless its environmental-law clinic turned over case information. The clinic had ruffled the feathers of one of the state’s key industries when it sued a prominent poultry business over its disposal of chicken waste.
The sponsor of the Louisiana bill, State Sen. Robert Adley, a Republican, says he was responding to complaints from chemical- and oil-industry lobbyists that lawsuits were chasing companies away from the state.
A hearing and vote on the bill, originally scheduled for Wednesday in the Senate Commerce Committee, was postponed to next week.
The presidents of Tulane and Loyola, Scott S. Cowen and Rev. Kevin Wildes, failed to sway Senator Adley during a recent meeting with him urging him to drop the bill. “He obviously feels there’s enough support to go forward, despite the outrageousness of the bill, particularly at a time when the Gulf is teeming with oil and people are dying on oil rigs,” says Robert R. Kuehn, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis who is co-director of an environmental-law clinic there.
Mr. Kuehn is also president of the Clinical Legal Education Association, which represents about 700 clinical law professors. The association delivered a letter to members of the Louisiana Senate Commerce Committee on Monday.
“Those supporting this bill appear more concerned about protecting favored businesses from compliance with the law and punishing the state’s universities than about higher education and access to justice,” it says.
Industry Accusations
Dan Borne, president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, says Tulane’s environmental-law clinic “appears to a casual observer to be concerned about poor folks, but if you take a closer look at its rap sheet, you have to wonder.”
He accuses the clinic of stirring up lawsuits and demonstrating a “wanton disregard for the economic well-being of the state.”
In a memo to association members this week, Mr. Borne urged them to consider withholding gifts to Tulane, a university “which gives cover to its out-of-state student want-to-be lawyers and their job-killing lawsuits.”
A statement on Tuesday from the Association of American Law Schools expressed “grave concerns” about proposed restrictions that would make it ethically impossible for law-clinics in Louisiana to represent clients.
The state’s legal clinics already operate under tough restrictions imposed by the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1999 after political and business leaders protested Tulane’s role in preventing a plastics company from building a $700-million plant in a low-income neighborhood.