Wendy B. Jacobs

Biography

Wendy B. Jacobs, Esq. is the Emmett Clinical Professor of Environmental Law at Harvard Law School and Director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. She is also on the Faculty of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Center for Health and the Global Environment and she is a member of the American College of Environmental Lawyers.  Ms. Jacobs received her J.D. with honors in 1981 from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, Ms. Jacobs first worked as an appellate lawyer and special litigator for the U.S. Department of Justice in its Environment Division in Washington, D.C. She then did a brief stint with a law firm in Seattle working on First Amendment and commercial litigation, followed by 18 years as a partner in the Boston law firm Foley Hoag LLP, where she worked almost exclusively on environmental matters, involving myriad environmental laws, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and a host of interesting private sector clients. Her work has covered the gamut of compliance counseling, handling of complex permit applications and their related hearings and appeals, preparation of comments on federal and state rulemakings, drafting of legislation, regulations and ordinances, administrative trials and appeals, litigation, negotiation and drafting of contracts, environmental due diligence and audits, and development of corporate risk management and environmental protection policies and manuals.

She came to Harvard in 2007 to create its Environmental Law & Policy Clinic. As Clinic Director, she provides her students a variety of complex, client-driven, environmental and energy law and policy projects, with a focus on renewable energy, climate change mitigation and resiliency, sustainable aquaculture and agriculture, microgrids and district energy, hydraulic fracturing, carbon capture and sequestration, improved oversight and management of offshore drilling, protection of the Arctic, energy justice and redistribution, and citizen science.  Among the Clinic's clients are a wide variety of government entities and NGOs.

In spring 2017, Ms. Jacobs will be teaching a new cross-campus course.  In this Climate Solutions Living Lab, students from multiple disciplines will collaborate in designing practical solutions to help low-income, under-served populations improve their living conditions with power generated by renewable sources of fuel while also helping universities and other enterprises to reduce their own climate impacts.  For two years, she taught and developed case studies for the Harvard Law School Problem Solving Workshop – an innovative class required of all first-year law students to expose them to lawyering skills.

She has written white papers and model legislation focused on carbon capture and sequestration; she has written chapters on the subject for inclusion in two books, one of which is Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, published by the American Bar Association in 2014 (SSRN Abstract ID: 2379600). The other, Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization of the U.S., is forthcoming.  Ms. Jacobs also participated in and chaired a session at the Sixth International Energy Agency Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) Regulatory Network Meeting in Paris, has presented at several insurance industry seminars on risks related to hydraulic fracturing, and co-hosted a conference on Climate Change Displacement: Finding Solutions to an Emerging Crisis in October 2016.  

For more information on Ms. Jacobs' work, please visit the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic website.

Areas of Interest

• Environmental Law and Policy
• Administrative Law
• Environmental Law and Policy: Development of Contaminated Properties (Brownfields)
• Environmental Law and Policy: Climate Change
• Environmental Law and Policy: Energy
• Environmental Law and Policy: Due Diligence and Distribution of Environmental Liabilities in Corporate Transfers
• Environmental Law and Policy: Policies and Technologies for the Reduction of Air and Water Pollution
• Environmental Law and Policy: Liability Regimes for Carbon Capture and Sequestration in the U.S. and China
• Environmental Law and Policy: Quantification and Reduction of Environmental Risks
• Environmental Law and Policy: Enactment of Pollution Reduction Laws in Europe (REACH, WEEI, and ROHS)