Student Wins Writing Competition

Jeremy Lawrence’s paper explores implications of regional effort to combat global warming

—By Lori Craig

Third-year USC Law student Jeremy Lawrence has won the “Endangered Environmental Laws” Student Writing Competition.

Lawrence’s winning entry, “Where Federalism and Globalization Intersect: The Western Climate Initiative as a Model for Cross-Border Collaboration between States and Provinces,” will be published in the Environmental Law Reporter and Lawrence will receive a $2,000 cash prize.

Jeremy Lawrence

One of Lawrence’s conclusions was that the regional plan probably will not have an effect because the next president and Congress likely will develop a national plan that would supersede it.

“But it’s still an interesting thing to look at,” Lawrence said. “If these states and provinces had this common goal of reducing carbon emissions, they could meet that by voluntarily agreeing to limits, and that’s how they would avoid running afoul of the Constitution: by keeping it voluntary rather than mandatory.”

The most interesting part of the issue, Lawrence said, is that the Western Climate Initiative is a new twist on the widely held view that state-based solutions are a traditional conservative idea, a product of “states’ rights” thinking rejuvenated by a conservative Supreme Court in the mid-90s.

“Instead, not only is the Western Climate Initiative aimed at a progressive policy – greenhouse gas reduction – but its cross-border approach is quite different from traditionalist states’ rights aims,” Lawrence said. “The WCI is sort of like states' rights for the 21st Century, as globalization is changing traditional ideas about what is possible. So it's an unusual mix of old and new, traditional and modern.”

Lawrence had already written a paper on the same subject as a student note for the Southern California Law Review when he heard about the writing competition, sponsored by the Environmental Law Institute, the American Bar Association and the National Association of Environmental Law Societies. Even though the topic of the competition dovetailed with Lawrence’s paper, he wasn’t sure he could meet the competition’s submission deadline until he received some encouragement from his paper advisor Prof. Edwin Smith, whose Foreign Relations and National Security Law course taught Lawrence most of the substantive law needed for the paper.

“I owe a big debt to Prof. Smith, who put the fear of God into me that I had to finish this paper on a tight deadline,” Lawrence said.

In the end, the effort paid off and Lawrence enjoyed working on the topic so much that he will recommend that USC Law’s journals look to outside writing competitions when generating prompts for student notes.

Lawrence is spending the summer working at Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles.