Profile XII: Professor Camille Pannu, Columbia University
In this issue, The Daily Dynamo met with Professor Camille Pannu, a clinical professor of law at Columbia University. Since joining the Columbia Law Faculty in 2022, Pannu founded the Environmental and Climate Justice Clinic, where she and her students have worked tirelessly to battle racial inequities and deliver justice to underserved communities across the nation. She now works in New York, but it was on the opposite coast where her passion for battling environmental inequities first blossomed.
“I come from an environmental justice community [in] Richmond, California,” Pannu explained. “It’s home to the largest oil refinery west of the Mississippi River,” she said, detailing the many environmental challenges that plagued the community during her childhood. Upon entering university, the professor’s focus turned to battling poverty.
“A lot of environmental studies didn’t look at the human element of environmental issues,” she asserted. Working on projects on education access and criminal justice, she realized that environmental inequities perpetuated the inherent barriers seen in these impoverished areas. “If you’re poisoned with lead in your water, you’re really set up to have a lot of challenges that other folks just don’t have,” Pannu said.
It was this realization that led Pannu to go into law, where she started out as a litigator. Now, she sees herself as a transactional lawyer, who “helps organizations get deals done, review contracts, apply for zoning changes,” among many other duties. Throughout her career in environmental law, she’s seen a shift from litigating to prevent harmful development to now fighting to introduce sustainable infrastructure into those same communities. By being a transactional lawyer, Pannu’s work is more empowered than ever before. “One of the fun things about being this kind of lawyer is I work almost as a tool that’s wielded by community members to facilitate their visions.”
Her style of work is not uncommon. In the private sector, transactional law is facilitated through the work of corporate law firms. “Transactions is the law of deals, or the law of how projects get done,” she explained, noting that skills used in transactional law are quite scalable, even if the legal matter of the case changes. While many in New York work with large companies and multinational conglomerates, her work focuses on those on the other side of the spectrum. Though “the difference is how you work with the client, the skillsets are really similar.”
Throughout her time at Columbia, and previously in California, she’s used such a skillset to tackle water inequities. “What was so sobering to me about water was that people didn’t even have access to it,” Pannu stressed, adding that drought and water scarcity is well-documented in the Western United States. However, some of her initial experiences with water inequities were not in America, but Africa. “I started out in rural Kenya on a water project,” she recounted. Then, the objective was to deliver clean water to rural communities without ‘networked water,’ the system of water distribution seen here in the United States through treatment plants and other infrastructure. International experiences like the project in Kenya allowed Pannu to learn more about international legal frameworks that can be adapted domestically in environmental affairs.
“In the international context, the tools are in a different body of law. For many countries, there’s a heavier reliance on human rights law to protect environmental rights,” Pannu explained, contrasting that legal methodology against the environmental legal framework of the United States, which focuses more on regulations, permits, and pollution management. “It’s more expansive that what we have [here], and we’re seeing the beginning of a trend where states are adopting the human rights norms into their state law.”
While such adoptions don’t violate any constitutional provisions, it creates an interesting dynamic where state-level regulatory frameworks have evolved much more rapidly than their national counterparts. Pannu cited Michigan’s proposed ‘right to clean drinking water’ and California ‘human right to water,’ with various municipalities in more reluctant states doing the same. “The other thing we’ve seen in several states is the passage of green, or environmental rights, amendments,” the professor noted, adding that New York has joined the movement as well. However, she sees herself as a cynic in terms of any type of action at the federal level.
“The United States doesn’t tend to sign onto positive human rights, which [affirm] a right to have something as opposed to a right to be free of something,” Pannu explained. While she sees “really interesting litigation at the state-to-state level under state constitutions,” she doesn’t believe such a trend will extend to states which aren’t already proactively engaging in such discussions. “In certain states, for example [in] the Gulf, where there's a heavy reliance on petrochemical industries, it’s much harder to get those states to come along,” she said, adding that even a state like Florida, which has weathered numerous hurricanes, has not proposed any such legislation.
With a second Trump administration on the horizon, Pannu’s hopes of progress are not optimistic. “It doesn’t help [that] we have a president who says climate change is a myth,” she lamented, adding that the main federal vehicle of environmental regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “stopped functioning except to speed up the processing of permits for polluting facilities” during his last administration. For the next four years, Pannu forecasts the “legal terrain will become much more difficult,” but with her passion and legal acumen, it is a battle that she is well-equipped to fight.
