A Fertile Ecosystem for Client Service, Clinical Training

From litigation targeting diesel emissions in Chicago’s neighborhoods and protecting water resources like Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, to reporting on the scope and changing ownership status of abandoned oil wells in Illinois, the Environmental Advocacy Center is one of many opportunities provided for Northwestern Pritzker School of Law students to gain clinical experience through the Bluhm Legal Clinic.

Launched in 2009 under founding Director Nancy Loeb, the Center handles litigation, administrative proceedings, transactional work and other avenues such as public advocacy, according to current Director Rob Weinstock, a clinical professor of law. At least eight students participate every semester, and the clinic course usually has a waitlist.

Often partnering with environmental advocacy groups and in particular community-based organizations, the Center’s team focuses on three primary genres of projects: environmental justice in the Chicago area, climate change and energy policy advocacy throughout Illinois, and federal litigation and regulatory advocacy to protect and restore natural resources. Students work with a range of professionals in addition to attorneys, such as journalists, scientists and economists, and they participate in a weekly seminar to learn how to jointly design and deliver solutions as part of these cross-functional teams.

“Sometimes, that is complex litigation in federal courts,” Weinstock says. “Sometimes, that is advising community groups on how to structure their entities, or deep research and writing on policy reform efforts. And sometimes, that is writing letters to agencies, and having meetings and trying to convince them to use their powers in certain ways.”

Weinstock, the only faculty member who devotes substantial time to the Center, tries to simultaneously meet two goals: provide excellent legal service to clients and a meaningful if not transformative experience for students with a broad spectrum of interests and goals.

“Some students come in and they want complex civil litigation training, and they care about environmental issues, but they’re not planning to pursue a career in environmental law. And that’s great—we have complex litigation opportunities,” he said. “Sometimes that means students who are really committed to a public interest environmental law career, and what they want is exposure to working with environmental NGOs and community clients, so they can start to understand what it’s like to do public interest environmental work. We do that too, and … they get to develop subject matter expertise.”

Weinstock says he relishes the challenge of addressing the spectrum of client and student needs and desires. “When we work with larger environmental nonprofits, such as the Sierra Club, Illinois chapter, we partner very closely with their lawyers,” he says. “But many of our clients are community-based organizations in Chicago that have no legal expertise whatsoever. And in those instances … we are the lawyers.”

Students Past and Present

Among students and recent alumni who have participated, some are working at large law firms, while others are clerking or doing public interest work, Weinstock says. “I have a student who’s clerking right now, but he really is committed to public interest environmental litigation,” he says. “And he worked on projects as part of a team with the lawyers who have the jobs that he wants to go get after his clerkships. Another works for the City of Chicago, but she had an engineering degree, and she conducted an expert deposition two years ago, and … figured out how to take her technical background into the legal space.”

Alumnus Chase Deatrick ’25, now a clerk with the Alaska Supreme Court, became involved in spring semester of his 2L year, and he first worked on cases related to permit compliance and water compliance. “Rob’s incredibly good at figuring out how to advance litigation while also slotting students into projects where they can be maximally helpful to the team, and the team can be helpful in building their skills,” he says, adding that he hopes to practice environmental law in the future.

Third-year student Stephanie Mao, who studied public health as an undergraduate, always had been interested in environmental law and joined the program last fall. But Mao, who will begin her career as an associate at Selendy Gay PLLC after graduation, didn’t precisely know what it meant to practice environmental law on a daily basis. “I thought that environmental law work was limited to very standard impact litigation cases, like you’re suing some corporation or government entity for causing environmental harms,” she says, adding that her first experience, working on a lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority for selling its coal and expanding coal-mining operations, did involve traditional litigation work.

But subsequent experiences have broadened her lens, Mao says. “This clinic has expanded my belief of what kind of work I want to do, and what kind of work is out there,” she says. “As much as I enjoyed doing complaint drafting and that kind of traditional litigation work—and obviously that’s going to be a huge component of what I do post-grad, at least in the short term at my law firm—I realized how much I value direct services, and community work.” She hopes to continue doing environmental work pro bono, she adds.

Third-year student Alexa Longstaff, who joined the summer after her 1L year, says she’s handled a wide range of matters, including litigation based on the federal Clean Water Act and policy-focused work on stormwater and flooding in certain Chicago neighborhoods. She came to the Law School knowing that she wanted to join the Center as soon as possible.

“I am really interested in environmental policy and protection, and I think law is a great way to pursue that interest,” she says. “Working in the Center with Rob and our clients was a formative experience for me, to not only discern what I want to do in the future, but also to get to feel like I’m making some kind of impact while in law school.”

After graduation, Longstaff will be a generalist in corporate transactions at Baker McKenzie in Chicago, while hoping to pursue new opportunities to practice environmental law. “Part of what I was able to discern through my experience with the Center is that I am not a big fan of working in litigation,” she says. “And that was a helpful discovery for me to know that, ‘OK, I function really well in a transactional space, and that’s where I have interests and opportunities.’”

Weinstock has been a great mentor for her, Longstaff adds. “That has been such an important part of law school for me, to have a consistent professor [knowing] what I’m interested in, and how he can help me pursue what I want to do,” she says.

Current and Recent Projects

Among the Center’s ongoing projects is work on behalf of the Chicago Environmental Justice Network, a grassroots coalition that works to combat the health and community impacts of  diesel emissions from trucks, among other issues.

At first, they hoped Illinois would adopt rules similar to those in California aimed to require heavy-duty vehicles to move toward cleaner engines. The Clinic led a statewide rule-making process during which students had the opportunity to cross-examine industry experts at live hearings. However, in 2025 the federal government created several barriers to Illinois adopting California’s rules, which has prompted the Center and its client to shift to strategies under Illinois law, Weinstock says. A Center student recently presented to the Illinois EPA an analysis of one policy option available under current Illinois law that the agency has not yet used.

As part of its work, the Center strives to partner with other faculty at Northwestern who bring technical expertise from the University’s globally leading scientific and engineering faculty; in this case, the Center worked with Dan Horton, associate professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, who served as an expert witness to present his lab’s studies of air quality and simulations on the impact of adopting California’s rules in Illinois.

Horton’s resulting study, published in peer-reviewed literature, explored, “How would the air quality change? How would people’s health change? What are the environmental justice implications of this particular policy?” he says. “I was asked to testify by Rob, both in written form and in the courtroom, and I was able to call on my knowledge.”

As of April 2026, the board has not made a final decision, though the legislature also could adopt such a policy. But regardless of the outcome, Horton finds it innovative that the Center taps into scientific expertise from around the university to help the community members and NGOs. “Rob and his team often seek us out and call on us to be expert witnesses in their legal and advocacy endeavors,” he says.

During the spring semester of his 3L year, Deatrick helped with several motions and replies the Center filed, contributed to notice and comment periods for the rulemaking process, and cross-examined a trucking industry witness during Illinois Pollution Control Board proceedings. “It was the first time I had done a cross-exam, and I had an incredible experience,” he says. “I honed my legal advocacy in the unique context of an agency rule-making proceeding. I gained a lot of experience working with advocacy-focused clients.”

A similar Center representation related to vehicle emissions and freight is its work with a community organization on the South Side of Chicago called Sustainable Englewood Initiatives (SEI), which champions the community impacted by a massive Norfolk Southern intermodal transfer facility in terms of air pollution, noise and truck traffic. Last year, Union Pacific announced it was trying to buy Norfolk Southern, a merger requiring antitrust approval from the federal Surface Transportation Board.

Although Weinstock is not an antitrust lawyer, per se, “Instead of relying on traditional environmental law strategies like the federal Clean Air Act, or local land use decision-making, which can be really complicated when it comes to the rail industry, we have identified this other opportunity to … advance our client’s environmental justice goals,” he says.

The merger would lead to more trains and disruptions to the community, leading to greater environmental and health harms,  says Mao, who has been involved preparing for public commenting opportunities among other work. “I believe Rob put me on this case, at least initially, because I worked on public health issues before law school,” she says. “Of course, rail operations have a lot of public health implications.”

Mao also values the working relationship she’s developed with the client, attaining a level of rapport that “is hard to get, sometimes, in those traditional litigation cases,” she says. “Moving forward, even when I’m doing the traditional litigation work, I want to be able to feel connected to my client.”

Another project of the Center that received widespread media attention was a report published in January about abandoned oil wells in Illinois, which garnered a front-page story in The Chicago Tribune and an appearance by Weinstock on WTTW-TV’s “Chicago Tonight” program. “That’s been very recent and been out there in the news, which is very exciting,” he says.

The Center’s client, an international group based in Los Angeles called ClientEarth, had noticed large companies that owned increasingly unproductive oil wells in other states kept selling them to shell companies designed to go bankrupt, so the state would have to pay for the cleanup—and wondered if the same might be true in Illinois.

The Center discovered that the State of Illinois’ regulatory and data collection system was too inadequate to be able to discern this, Weinstock says, adding that with his oversight, students submitted multiple rounds of FOIA requests to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, analyzed the documents received, researched relevant state laws and regulations as well as similar programs in other states, interviewed agency officials and drafted the report.

“It started out as a litigation-oriented project, and then it became a policy and research report that we put out to … spotlight the fact that Illinois’ regulatory system is such a laggard, nationally,” he says.

Ben Segal, an attorney with ClientEarth based in Pittsburgh, says the partnership was productive on his end as well, noting that the Pritzker students were smart, engaged and (along with Weinstock) brought the on-the-ground perspective, while his group added the national viewpoint.

“It was a good opportunity for the students to think about regulations and legislation and FOIAs and all the rest of that,” he says. “From our perspective, working with clinics is always great. Not only do we help train future lawyers, but we expand our capacity to bring our thinking further..”

The project also has advanced the goals of ClientEarth “in ways I was really pleased with,” Segal adds. “We’ve had some real interest so far in people wanting to talk more with us. It’s a problem that might hurt the state. It’s important to make it visible.”

The Center and ClientEarth are putting the information and recommendations in the hands of government officials and policymakers in the hopes of spurring the state to act—another example of a case that makes a huge difference not just in students’ lives, but for the Earth.