Profile VI: Professor Robert A. Weinstock, Northwestern University
In this issue, The Daily Dynamo met with Professor Robert Weinstock, a clinical professor at law at Northwestern University Law School. Throughout his career in law, he’s pursued a triple mandate of education, litigation, and policymaking in environmental law. Such a passion blossomed through two formative experiences – seeing the complex land use laws that governed his local community in high school and as an intern at the New Jersey Office of Environmental Protection, where he began to fully realize the cumulative pollution and environmental effects of industry and transportation, despite no one entity violating pollution thresholds. Such a revelation led him to pursue a career that is still founded through one dogma: how do we make environmental law account for communities’ variety of environmental stressors?
Through private practice and public interest work at the University of Chicago’s Abrams Environmental Clinic, he continued to litigate on behalf of communities he sees as the greatest victims to industrial work, among other negative environmental stressors. Since coming to Northwestern, he’s continued the litigation and policy proposals aimed at the problems he saw years ago, focusing on granting community organizations a greater voice in governing energy services and lowering utility rates in their areas, many of which are recognized as ‘low income’. Such a love for pro bono initiatives blossomed during law school, as Weinstock said his “favorite part of Columbia was the law school clinic” , the setting allowing him to “interact with big ideas but put them into practice to make the world a better place”. In these more most impacted communities, Weinstock argued that it is high time for “public interest representation by environmental groups to be moved into the energy space as well”. Drawing on the experiences he learned alongside Professor Mark Templeton, a colleague at the University of Chicago whose collaborative work alongside local communities and government entities made Weinstock more cognizant of the overall process. Throughout what he calls an ‘ongoing process’, Weinstock wants key results in target communities “investment in renewables, electrification, electric vehicles” and other ‘relatively new areas of policy’. However, he argued that such a reformation “will only work if major electric and gas utilities are trying to make them work”.
For background, utilities are largely governed through state level commissions, which review rates, policy proposals, and other potential actions by utilities. “Commercial groups and ratepayer advocates [such as AARP] have always participated – what is missing is the community organizations in low income communities and communities of color”. While some may see Weinstock’s work as less ambitious than other reforms in the energy space, he argues that the “outcome is not always so large and dramatic”, highlighting that previous work has targeted created a more flexible threshold of income eligibility regarding utility rates which will more accurately reflect energy hardship, making energy equity issues between urban centers like Chicago and more rural communities more relatable.
To Weinstock, much of these issues of energy equity are perpetuated by climate change: “In the absence of federal legislative action on climate change, state legislatures around the country have stepped up in various ways to produce leading policy”, he said citing Illinois’ 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), which he hailed as ‘groundbreaking in the Midwest’ as it required large utilities to create ‘beneficial electrification plans’ – such plans can include integration of renewable energy into utility power sources, building electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure, etc. Such plans, Weinstock noted, must go through the review process that community groups can once again influence, if they are emboldened to do so and have legal representation to be in these policymaking spaces. However, the professor noted that many utilities’ plans overestimate their equitability:
Commercial interests seeking to influence one utility plan sought to have the plan count as an equity investment in a low-income community the construction of an EV charging stations mile away from an underserved community, “if you live apply that to a densely populated area like Chicago, you could be crediting as an equitable investment a charging station in one of wealthiest zip codes in the country because it’s within a mile of one of the least wealthiest zip codes in the country.”.
Such issues may be allayed by national regulation, which “would be beneficial for things like electrification” Weinstock stated, “What we’ve seen in the Biden administration is a huge influx of federal funding to support electrification”, referring to the Inflation Reduction Act and Build Back Better Act, respectively. Despite such funding, he maintained that such initiatives should provide “sticks that require states to meet certain targets for electrification – how they meet those targets is an appropriate question for the states themselves”. Such a topic is heavily influenced by the perspective of the federal government, and with two dueling mandates of energy in America.
“One candidate wants to move the transition forward and address climate change robustly – the other wants to roll back those efforts”, he said, noting that how those plans play out will have some ‘interesting wrinkles’. Reflecting on the current administration, Weinstock has observed efforts to ‘maintain state autonomy to maintain climate change focused legislation and slow deregulation that the Trump administration sought”. With a Harris victory, such policy would continue, though he did not speculate about whether or not “more sticks would become involved and how aggressive they would get”.
Unlike the dynamic and everchanging landscape of environmental policy, Weinstock has stressed a nuanced and more straightforward dogma in environmental litigation. Above many of the general duties of any specialty in the legal profession, one must have ‘professional empathy’ – where one must deeply internalize motivates and goals of the client. Moreover, though every attorney is tasked with researching legal doctrine and building a case to argue in court, environmental and energy lawyers must wrestle with statutory interpretation, administrative and regulatory law, and telescoping authority, which underpins the former. From a constitutional doctrine, there are statutes that create the legal framework, regulations which were created to implement that framework, as well as permits to apply those statutes and regulations to particular facilities. Therefore, an attorney in the space must understand all that “falls within the constitutional authority”. In addition to the complex telescoping analysis litigators must do, there is another key tenet of energy law that Weinstock truly loves: it deals with “concrete, real world science and technology”. Understanding the ‘underlying environmental processes’, he said is key to understanding a profession he tells his students is about ‘suits and boots’, where the courtroom litigation and fieldwork investigation intersect.
Such lessons he teaches his students are grounded in his own work at the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, as well as his time in private practice prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty. During that time, he litigated numerous cases against corporations who violated compliance laws, namely U.S Steel. In this case, Weinstock said, the company had leaked 300 lbs of carcinogenic hexavalent chromium into Lake Michigan, which was detected by the city of Chicago’s drinking water intake miles away. For years, he and his team fought for ‘more strict sets of compliance requirements as well as a larger penalty”. It was in battling large corporations that Weinstock realized another central tenet of energy and environmental law – cooperation with government regulators is key to legal victories.
“It’s important to work in alignment with the regulators… and understanding these regulatory institutions in a really nuanced way”, Weinstock emphasized.
As he continues his fight outside of the classroom to advance energy equity, he will continue to convey the lessons he’s learned in the practice of energy/environmental law to his students, preparing the next generation of altruistic attorneys to make even greater change.
