Professor John Bonine has devoted his 35-year legal career to creating, implementing, and enforcing environmental law. He began in 1972 as a Legislative Assistant in the U.S. Senate, continued at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he was Associate General Counsel for Air, Noise, and Radiation, and has taught at the University of Oregon since 1978. 

Prof. Bonine's academic record includes a book, The Law of Environmental Protection, and numerous law review articles and book chapters in the U.S., U.K., Ukraine, Brazil, and Chile. He co-founded the world's first law school Environmental Law Clinic in 1978 (now replicated in 30 clinics in the US and others in Europe and Latin America), and co-founded the renowned Public Interest Environmental Law Conferences, which attract more than 2,000 participants each year. He teaches Pollution Law, Comparative Environmental Law, Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, and an LLM Seminar. He has engaged in extensive diplomatic and consulting work in Europe and Asia.

As a lawyer, Prof. Bonine has extensively litigated in both trial courts and appellate courts, both at EPA and in Oregon's Environmental Law Clinic. His successes include court rulings that allowed EPA to use the precautionary principle in pesticide cancellations and to use technology-forcing in air pollution regulation. Other cases have forced government agencies to write environmental impact statements in "plain language" and to use "worst-case analysis." 

Bonine also established the precedent that using documents in order to sue the government was a valid basis for obtaining them for free under the Freedom of Information Act. With students and a faculty colleague, he helped initiate and prosecute the first cases to protect the Northern Spotted Owl, helping to bring about a transformation in the timber industry and protect the environment of the Pacific Northwest.

Not content with working alone and seeking to expand the footprint of public interest law, Prof. Bonine has worked to promote the "private public interest bar" since 1983, co-founded the 60-nation Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (E-LAW) in 1989, created a domestic network of 250 environmental law enforcers in 1990, and created a worldwide network of 400 environmental law professors in 1991. Each initiative continues to thrive as Bonine searches for additional ways to introduce new generations of law students to careers protecting the planet.