Nicholas Robinson
PROFESSOR OF LAW
Co-Director, Center for Environmental Legal Studies
B.A. Brown University
J.D. Columbia University
If there is any truth held in Kurt Vonnegut’s view that mankind is a destructive disease on the face of our earth, finally being eradicated by fire, flood and earthquake, Pace Law School Professor Nicholas Robinson could very well have the cure... not through annihilation, as Vonnegut recently argued, but via what has always been man’s saving grace: reason, arbitration and compromise.
“An environmental lawyer necessarily is adept not merely as a legal practitioner, but equally as an arbiter among society’s competing visions about ecology,” said Robinson, who founded Pace’s environmental law program. “An environmental lawyer seeks paths toward sustaining life today and for the future. The challenges of restoring, maintaining and enhancing our environment beckon all of us to be part of the problem, or the means toward solutions. I delight in working with each new lawyer educated at Pace to become a problem-solver."
Robinson is serving as the Chairman of the Organizing Committee of a 2006 environmental colloquium being held at Pace Law School, the theme of which will be Compliance and Enforcement of Environmental Law. Every year, for the past three years, the International Academy of Environmental Law has held a conference for environmental law professors called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which includes international governments and environmental agencies. “This will be the focal event for environmental law in 2006 hosting up to 70 environmental law professors from around the world, as Pace celebrates its centennial,” Robinson said.
Because the law school has a number of alumni who have gone on to become environmental law professors, Robinson’s former students will have a strong presence. “Attending will be a member of the Kuwait University law faculty, the dean of a law school in Brazil, our own Bobby Kennedy who took his Master’s in environmental law here and Dr. Robert Goldstein, general counsel to the Riverkeeper here in New York... all Pace Law alumni.”
The event is the latest achievement in a résumé that would make an opponent of the paper industry wince. Robinson has developed environmental law since 1969 when he was named to the Legal Advisory Committee of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. He has practiced environmental law in law firms, for municipalities and as former general counsel of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He drafted New York’s wetlands and wild bird laws and was inaugurated as the first chairman of both the statutory Freshwater Wetlands Appeals Board and Greenway Heritage Conservancy for the Hudson River Valley. In addition, he has authored numerous books and articles on environmental law.
Robinson rates development of the Pace Environmental Law Program the greatest of his achievements. “We just won the ABA award for Excellence and Achievement in Environmental Law and we have one of the largest programs in the world. The work of our students is my proudest achievement. Their competence and expertise in leadership is extraordinary. I tell my third generation students that they are doing all the things I wish I could be doing.”
When Robinson entered the field in the late 1960s at Columbia Law School, pollution was a national issue, but the academic curricula was void of any courses dealing with conservation of nature or protection of the environment. Consequently, he organized a seminar on the subject of protecting nature conducted by alumni, and as a result, in 1970, was appointed to the first legal advisory committee to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.
After clerking for a federal judge, opening an environmental law practice in New York City, in 1978 he came to Pace to start what is now one of the premier environmental law programs in the world.