At noon today, students had the opportunity to sit in on a talk by an experienced and high-level executive at ExxonMobil who spoke about corporate environmental responsibility in the context of climate change. In addition to providing a very interesting perspective that students rarely have the opportunity to hear, he talked at some length about the role of lawyers in the decisionmaking that takes place at the corporate level.
Just two hours later, the Law School was the site of a public Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) meeting convened by the State of Louisiana, concerning the Deepwater Horizon explosion and BP Oil Spill. This was an extraordinary opportunity for law students (and others) to see the process that they have studied at work. Representatives of the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, Oil Spill Coordinator, Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and Department of Natural Resources were present, along with representatives of NOAA at the federal level, among others.
And an hour after that meeting concluded, the Eason-Weinmann Lecture began. Professor Jeffrey Jowell of University College London, and a practicing barrister, spoke on "Exporting Democracy: Absolutes and Relatives."