"Funneling" - 49% Of Oil Majors' Lawyers Came From Top 20 Law Schools
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The report describes some of the factors that tend to push law students into working for big law firms that service fossil fuel clients. These include the burden of student debt and the relative ease of getting a post-grad corporate law job compared to seeking out lower-paid public interest work. This is often facilitated by the elite law schools, which grant large firms access to students through campus recruiting events, whereas students looking for non-“BigLaw” jobs have to put in more effort in the job search. Those seeking out such jobs must have a “willingness and ability to make far less money upon graduation,” the report adds.
Financial considerations and close ties with corporate or fossil fuel interests may also be behind top law schools’ facilitation of the fossil fuel lawyer pipeline. “Among the schools that produce fossil fuel lawyers at the highest rates, fossil fuel lawyers play a prominent role in the schools’ relationships with donors,” the report notes. “For example, the Chairman of the University of Texas Law School Foundation worked as Vice President and General Counsel of ExxonMobil, while the chair of the Yale Law School Fund is a senior lawyer at Shell.”
The report also points out that some prestigious universities are recipients of Koch cash. The Charles Koch Foundation, which administers donations on behalf of the fossil-fuel-financed Koch family, donated over $3.7 million to New York University, over $1.5 million to Harvard University, and more than $1.18 million to Stanford University, according to the Foundation’s 2021 IRS 990 filing. Tax form disclosures prior to 2019, when the Foundation stopped delineating between university and law school donations, reveal that it gave $400,000 and $343,000 to Stanford Law School in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
“Legal education—and particularly ‘elite’ law schools—have been captured by corporate interests that profit from, among other things, rendering the planet uninhabitable,” said Jon Hanson, the Alan A. Stone Professor of Law and the Director of the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School. “The time is long overdue for those law schools and their BigLaw benefactors to be judged not according to their lofty justice claims or their astronomical wealth but according to their actual consequences here on Earth.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2023/03/09/top-law-schools-serve-fossil-fuel-industry/
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