In a new report released Thursday, Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA) lays out the dramatically high rates at which top law schools are sending their graduates into anti-climate lawyering work.
The report, titled Fueling the Climate Crisis: Measuring T-20 Participation in the Fossil Fuel Lawyer Pipeline, details how the top 20 law schools in the U.S. News & World Report rankings produced fossil fuel lawyers at rates more than three times the national law school average within the past year. Harvard, notably, produces fossil fuel lawyers at 4.2 times the average, coming in fourth (behind Yale, UVA, and Texas) in fossil fuel lawyer graduate production.
These rankings are based on a dataset of over 3,000 corporate lawyers determined by LSCA to be significantly focused on fossil fuel work in their practices.
Beyond these stunning numbers, the report discusses in detail the pressures pushing law students at top schools into the corporate legal world, and the risks to our environment, national and local economies, and vulnerable communities that such work presents.
LSCA has previously reported on top law firms’ contributions to the climate crisis: for several years now, they have published an annual scorecard grading each of the Vault 100 law firms on the amount of anti-climate litigation, transactional work, and lobbying they undertake. In recent years, only a few law firms have earned an A rank, while most, owing to their significant anti-climate business, earn D’s and F’s.
This new report represents another piece of the puzzle: the law schools that produce the lawyers that make up these firms. In an interview with Erica Liu, a second-year law student at NYU and the Research Co-Chair of LSCA, and Jamie Smith, a first-year law student at NYU and a lead author on the report, the pressing need for such a report was clear.
“It’s one thing for law firms to recruit; it’s another thing for law schools to be receptive to that recruiting,” emphasized Liu.
“In the context of the U.S. News & World Report Rankings,” added Smith, “this was an opportunity for reevaluation. What makes a law school elite?”
Earlier this year, over 40 law schools withdrew from the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Harvard, in fact, was the second prominent law school to do so, following only a few hours after Yale. As Smith noted, shifting the focus away from those rankings creates an opportunity for new metrics to take center stage.
The report also details the pipeline from top law schools into corporate private interest legal work, and more specifically, into fossil fuel work—which the report identifies as “the T-20 to fossil fuel lawyer pipeline.”
The factors pushing students into corporate legal work include the comparative ease of securing a BigLaw job, disparate focus on corporate legal careers from schools’ career services offices, and—perhaps most significantly—ballooning student debt. The press release indicates that 71% of law students graduate with debt, and that the average student loan debt upon graduation is $180,000. The crushing weight of these loans is, unsurprisingly, an oft-cited factor in the decision to put off public interest plans and work in the corporate legal world.
These fossil fuel careers, the report notes, directly harm vulnerable communities, especially Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. They contribute deeply to environmental injustice.
“A lot of law schools talk about advancing justice,” said Smith. “It’s ironic in this context, where each T-20 school sends graduates to Vault 100 Firms, and those firms are perpetrating injustice. I struggle to see how that’s working towards the advancement of justice.”
Anecdotally at least, firms seem to be aware of this dissonance. Liu and Smith have heard that some firms will ask about LSCA’s law firm scorecards in interviews, in an attempt to gauge whether students have read it.
Along with the law firm scorecards, LSCA hopes that this law school scorecard can lead the way to structural reforms.
“We would like to see law schools as institutions recognize what we’re saying and potentially make changes to their career services,” said Liu.
In the meantime, the burden to act may fall to students. Both Liu and Smith proposed that the report could be useful to incoming law students.
“The numbers can indicate a culture at the school, and how supported students are for certain careers,” said Liu. “For students dedicated to public interest, this could have an impact on what school they attend.”
For current students, the report can be a tool for activism.
“The report brings to light structural issues, but also provides information students can use to organize against administrations to make the needed changes,” said Smith.
LSCA’s press release included several concrete asks.
“Specifically, the report calls on schools to work towards eliminating pressures students face to pursue fossil fuel work, mitigating the pipeline to BigLaw and fossil fuel work, and preparing students for careers of the present and future by expanding curriculums in the renewables and clean energy field,” it reads.
In that press release, Melissa Kay, a second-year law student at Yale and a lead author on the report, presents a cutting, ultimate question: “Why does the legal education system make it so much easier for students to get a job destroying the climate than helping it?”