Wendy Jacobs ’81, one of the nation’s most highly celebrated environmental law experts and the founder of the first-ever environmental law and policy clinic at Harvard Law School, died on Feb. 1, after a long illness. She was 64.
Students, faculty and staff in the Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic are still hard at work, pushing back against the current administration’s attempts to undo environmental regulations approved under former President Barack Obama ’91.
A plan designed by a team of Harvard University students to create a reliable source of renewable, affordable electricity for a Puerto Rican community hammered in 2017 by Hurricane Maria has moved a step closer to reality. The students are enrolled in Professor Wendy Jacobs’ Harvard’s “Climate Solutions Living Lab” course.
With 29 clinics in a wide range of fields of law and policy, Harvard Law School students can develop skills in an experiential program that constantly adapts to their interests, as well as to new approaches and areas of the law. Here are four accounts from students using that opportunity to address pressing legal and social issues.
A letter drafted by HLS’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic Director Wendy Jacobs, and signed by nearly 100 hospital leaders and Harvard faculty, calls on the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its proposed rule on scientific “transparency,” saying that the change would drastically limit the scientific and medical knowledge that underlie a host of EPA regulations that protect human health.
Led by Professor Wendy Jacobs, director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, the Climate Solutions Living Lab course launched last spring to help push forward the transition to a carbon-free future that supports planetary and human health.
In a recent conversation at HLS with Dean Martha Minow, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and U.N. special envoy on El Niño and climate change, told the story of how she came to be an “Angry Granny” on the topic of climate change, starting with her discussions with people in the most deeply affected communities.
Wendy Jacobs ’81, clinical professor and director of Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, will lead the Living Lab Course and Research Project, which is designed to bring together students from across the University in interdisciplinary teams to develop innovative approaches for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at Harvard and beyond.
Harvard students, faculty and fellows are training new high-tech instruments on Boston’s skies, searching for one well-known troublemaker and one escapee among the atmosphere’s invisible gases.
Ten research projects driven by faculty collaborators across six Harvard Schools will share over $1 million in the second round of grants awarded by the Climate Change Solutions Fund, an initiative launched last year by President Drew Faust to encourage multidisciplinary research around climate change.
