Will Big Law ever get out of bed with Big Oil?
IDK, but it's a good excuse to interview Aidan Bassett from Law Students for Climate Accountability!
Hello, and welcome (back) to Work Climate! I’m David, and I’m interested in how the climate crisis is impacting the career choices of people like me (overeducated and nominally progressive). When I started law school in 2021, I had very little idea what I wanted my legal career to look like. Now that I’m set to graduate in the spring, I thankfully know exactly what I’m doing…
Anyway, I knew that I cared about climate change, but I wasn’t drawn to environmental law per se, and it wasn’t clear how much the law had to do with climate politics or organizing (still an open question). So, when a friend showed me this podcast featuring one of the founders of Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA), Camila Bustos, I was immediately taken in.
It turned out that, less than two years prior, a group of climate-conscious law students had made big waves with the publication of LSCA’s first Scorecard, which gave letter grades to the top 100 corporate law firms in the United States (“Big Law”), based on their portfolio of work on behalf of anti-climate clients. The goal? Shame those prestigious firms into accepting less money from fossil fuel interests (i.e., defend fewer oil companies against lawsuits; facilitate fewer contracts for carbon extraction; lobby less for gas subsidies, etc.), and inspire students to organize on their campuses, so that neither they nor their peers would accept interviews or jobs with the worst-ranking firms.
This was a provocative idea, and it indeed provoked a large reaction, including in publications like The Guardian and The New Yorker. The legal world went up in arms, with many corporate recruiters and PR specialists forced to defend their F-ranked employers’ social and environmental impact, e.g., by pointing to pro bono projects or work in clean energy. Still other firms ignored LSCA, criticized its methodology, or – in a somewhat demented twist on the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of counsel to indigent criminal defendants – defended their right to provide quality legal services to all people (read: corporations), regardless of their popularity. Speaking with students who took up LSCA’s call when the first Scorecard dropped, I knew that reactions on campuses were far from universally positive, either.
The 2023 Scorecard from Law Students for Climate Accountability. I encourage you to download and give the full report a read – the data, methodology, and anecdotes are all fascinating, whether or not you’re looking for a Big Law gig.
As it turns out, many people – and especially elite law students unaccustomed to having their options limited – do not take kindly to the suggestion that their personal enrichment might be facilitating our species’ extinction. When friends and I started our own on-campus organization – Stanford Law Students for Climate Action – to spread LSCA’s message, we ran into variations of such defensive reactions repeatedly. This led to some difficult conversations, with our peers and between ourselves, as we grappled with missteps in communication and unresolved tensions in what, exactly, we and LSCA were trying to accomplish: In a global capital system seemingly hellbent on burning every drop of oil while it is still profitable to do so, can individual choices ever make a difference? Was it our place as a group of mainly white, wealthy students to judge the decisions of students of color or those with no familial safety net? Did focusing on the environment inherently discount other sorts of serious social harms perpetuated by Big Law?
I won’t pretend any of these questions have clean answers. I am glad, though, to have seen LSCA take criticisms seriously and evolve. In just a few years, the organization has acquired institutional funding, increased the diversity of its leadership, and expanded its focus beyond the United States. At the same time, it remains a project predominantly focused on top-ranked schools and alternates between campaigning against individual firms and indicting large swaths of the legal industry, still figuring out how best to accomplish its goals.
So! I’m very grateful that Aidan Bassett — LSCA’s Media Co-Chair, a 2L at Georgetown University Law Center, and President of LSCA’s Georgetown Chapter — agreed to help me think through these tricky issues with the thoughtful answers below. Also much love to Kelsey Dunn — a friend, fierce climate advocate, and LSCA’s Student Outreach Co-Chair — for presenting this little project as worthwhile media engagement, lol. Since this newsletter is mainly about me learning out loud, I’d like to do more of these sorts of interviews in the future, so please let me know if you have ideas for future guests, topics, or formats! OK, here goes:
Law school is hard and career decisions are nuanced, personal matters. How does LSCA convince students to factor climate considerations into their job searches, let alone take the time to organize on their campuses to change how the legal industry treats the planet?
Aidan Bassett: Many students already feel that climate issues will shape the course of their lives, affecting decisions like where they can live and whether they plan to have children. And with students more vividly aware of the climate crisis than any previous generation — as skies darken with smoke across the country every summer and record heat waves take lives — many feel that the choice is stark: Join the climate arsonists, or do literally anything else. And there are a great many jobs that do not implicate climate issues, so the challenge is less to get students to care — since they already do — and more to equip them with information about which prospective employers are complicit on climate, and which are spurning greenwashing in favor of a serious commitment to accountability.
So how do we convince students? We don’t. They don’t need convincing. Law students are smart enough to see the big picture themselves. Our job is just to give them a platform, a community, and information to act in keeping with their convictions. They need support and infrastructure to start [on-campus LSCA] chapters (or join extant ones), which we provide, but the drive is all theirs because what everyone confronting the climate crisis needs most is to know we’re not alone: We’re part of a movement, one that’s racking up real wins and changing the course of human history.
LSCA was started at Harvard and Yale just a few years ago, but now there are students using its Scorecards and other resources at law schools around the country. To what do you attribute such rapid growth, and how has the organization changed now that it’s no longer a project just for students at name brand universities?
AB: We think the ethos of LSCA has helped rapidly broaden our formal network and motivate broad-based participation: We believe in a non-hierarchical campaign of direct action and coordinated pressure via firms’ recruitment processes. But also there is nothing about selective schools that gives them unique insight into the climate crisis or access to its solutions; on the contrary, frontline communities, disproportionately underrepresented at elite schools, are the ones best positioned to lead this movement, understand the needed solutions, and keep the focus on an equitable transition. So LSCA is very excited to see this movement expand because it’s increasingly including the very kinds of leaders this movement needs, with perspectives that will only accelerate the growing inclusiveness and equity of LSCA.
Unfortunately, this movement is also growing because the climate crisis is steadily impacting more and more people’s lives, more and more seriously. It is increasingly commonplace for people to witness the impacts of the climate crisis in their communities and feel a desperate desire to do something about it. With a challenge so immense, taking action in professional and personal avenues can feel deeply rewarding and empowering.
Students come to law school with vastly different backgrounds and goals. Some have generational wealth and a plethora of career options; others may have family obligations, or a tougher time finding a job after graduation. How does LSCA account for these differences — often mediated by class and race — in its messaging and methodology?
AB: Above all, LSCA stays focused on firms. The Vault 100 firms have been our focus since LSCA began because they represent the most profitable engines of the legal establishment and thus face none of the conflicts of less-resourced, less-equipped organizations and communities. Whereas many institutions and communities face difficult trade-offs as they confront the climate crisis with scarce resources (particularly peoples across the Global South, long dispossessed by the Global North), law firms are the ones making off like bandits at the climate’s expense.
As such, our messaging does not indiscriminately place a personal onus on students to solve the climate crisis; instead, LSCA focuses on the firms whose clients and commitments already align with climate accountability in an effort to help students reward those firms when they apply. And where students cannot afford to decline an offer from a complicit firm, we encourage them to pressure firms internally to change their client-acquisition practices and take seriously the reputational damage of being associated with climate culprits like Big Oil. Today’s F-rated firms won’t close up shop overnight, after all, and must therefore be pressured to be part of the solution.
How has the Scorecard changed over the years? Have any criticisms from firms or jobseekers been integrated into its iterations? There will never be a perfect way to give firms a letter grade, but what do you think LSCA has gotten right in adjusting its methodology, and where is there still work to do?
AB: We believe the Scorecard has only grown more comprehensive and more aligned with our values over time, with increased attention to the dangers of greenwashing and the reality that climate-positive work (like representing renewable energy firms) does not offset or erase the grave damage of representing fossil fuel clients. And because we strive to be rigorous in our methodology and in our actual execution, we’re always open to ways we can better reflect equity considerations in our methodology, among other areas of potential improvement.
There’s a limit, however, to our openness to firms’ criticisms, because unlike other pledges and groups, we don’t see it as our job to make this easy for firms. Beyond corrections to our datasets, we only incorporate firms’ feedback when we think doing so more accurately captures the picture of which firms are complicit in the climate crisis and which are early movers in the right direction. So while in future, we might hope to expand our system to grade medium-sized firms or other important actors in the legal industry, we currently feel the Scorecard, both substantively and methodologically, is doing its job — holding the Vault 100’s feet to the fire while giving them clear steps for how they can take meaningful action and earn better grades.
It's difficult to precisely track the results of a project like LSCA, but I wonder if you have an idea of what success looks like for LSCA in the long run — and at what point will it no longer be needed?
AB: We’d love to put ourselves out of business, so to speak. We’d rather not exist in the first place, actually. But the legal industry ranks alongside the financial and insurance industries as one of the most powerful enablers of the fossil fuel industry setting our planet ablaze. So for now, we see success as changing firms’ conduct. They need to stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, work to wind down their current fossil representations as fast as legally possible, and ideally, take our pledge and/or make legally binding commitments not to represent fossil fuel corporations and their interests. If fossil fuel companies had to struggle to find, keep, and afford legal services — and even then, found relatively inexpert representation — we would feel we were winning.
For now, we’re not expecting to go anywhere anytime soon. But when the Vault 100 together represent no fossil fuel companies, when that work is too stigmatized and too toxic to touch, we’ll happily pack up and move on to other areas of climate action.
Did I get something wrong? Miss an issue? Present something confusingly? Yeah, I know. Let’s talk about anything else: creminsdavid@gmail.com :)