Lawyering for the Climate

Climate change and its consequences suffuse nearly all areas of law, but for law students who want to focus intentionally on climate, selecting a career path in an ever-shifting social, technological, and judicial environment can be daunting. Join Wasserstein Fellow Matt Littleton ’10, an attorney at Envolve Law, for a discussion of his career as a government and private public-interest litigator specializing in federal and state climate policy. Matt will discuss ways (some obvious, others not) that litigating and non-litigating attorneys are tackling one of the most pressing and vexing problems of our time, and offer thoughts on where the field may be heading.

Lunch provided. Please RSVP below! Open to the HLS community.

If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations, please contact HLS Accessibility Services at accessibility@law.harvard.edu two weeks in advance of the event.

Matt Littleton (he/him) is co-founder and principal of Envolve Law, a small firm that consults for and litigates on behalf of clients advancing the clean-energy transition in a just and responsible manner. In the Biden Administration, Matt was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice, supervising all the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s litigation in the courts of appeals, the enforcement of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, and the defense of federal actions under pollution-control statutes. Matt started his legal career as a staff attorney in the Division’s Appellate Section. Between his stints at Justice, Matt was a partner at another firm—now known as Donahue, Goldberg & Herzog—where he litigated environmental and other public-law cases for NGOs and municipalities. Matt clerked on the Federal Circuit after graduating in 2010 with a joint degree from HLS and HKS. During law school, he worked at the Office of Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House. Matt holds a chemistry degree and taught English and other subjects in Central America and North Carolina before law school.