SF Litigation 2009 Sping Externship

NRDC is a leading nonprofit environmental organization that has been marshaling science and the law to protect the environment and public health since 1970.  Within each of the organization’s program areas – air, water, public health, climate change, energy, public land, smart growth, international, urban, environmental justice, and nuclear non-proliferation – NRDC’s experts pursue cutting-edge litigation, sophisticated lobbying, hard-hitting scientific research, and broad-reaching public education.  We employ over 350 scientists, lawyers, economists, media specialists, policy analysts, and administrators and maintain offices in San Francisco, Santa Monica, New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, and Beijing.  Over the past 35 years, NRDC has played a central role in crafting, implementing, enforcing, and defending virtually all of the nation’s environmental laws.

NRDC’s San Francisco Litigation Team supports NRDC’s organizational goals through litigation on a broad range of environmental issues (including global warming and energy, public health and environmental justice, air and water pollution, water allocation and policy, wildlife and wild places, and oceans and overfishing).  Over the past two years, the Team’s work has included trials to protect threatened delta smelt and threatened and endangered salmonids from risks of extinction posed by the state and federal water projects in California; challenges to Department of Energy regulations that set inadequate energy efficiency standards and to an Environmental Protection Agency regulation that permitted intentional pesticide dosing experiments on humans; defense of a landmark San Francisco ordinance that protects children from estrogenic phthalates in soft plastic children’s toys; and lawsuits against the County of Los Angeles and City of Malibu for discharging polluted stormwater and against the U.S. Department of Transportation for polluting San Francisco Bay by unlawfully managing hazardous waste and discharging toxic heavy metals from more than sixty obsolete and degrading ships anchored in San Francisco Bay.

Law and undergraduate externs work with the San Francisco Litigation Team’s three attorneys to draft legal briefs, research memos, comment letters and other correspondence for active or developing cases.  Externs are staffed on cases in several different environmental areas and invited to participate in meetings and attend any scheduled hearings concerning those cases.  Externships are unpaid, but we work with externs to help them obtain academic credit (through clinical, pro bono, or other school-sponsored programs) for their time.  Externs must be prepared to commit 18-25 hours per week of in-office work over the course of at least one academic term, with a preference for a full-year commitment.  NRDC seeks passionate students with the intelligence, skill, confidence, and maturity to assume serious responsibility.