Green Gavels Project New web guide presents more than 30 years of Michigan Supreme Court decisions affecting environment By John Masson A comprehensive evaluation of every environmental decision made by the Michigan Supreme Court in the last 30 years has yielded the first online reference tool of its kind, a web guide that lets Michigan voters see at a glance how each court decision affected the environment. The Michigan League of Conservation Voters (LCV) created the Green Gavels online reference tool as a learning aid for Michigan voters. Students at Michigan Law, led by Environmental Law and Policy Program founding director David Uhlmann, researched each case and wrote summaries of each one that fell into the categories of conservation or the environment. Those summaries were then reviewed by Michigan LCV attorneys and a bipartisan panel, which applied red, yellow, or green gavels to indicate the conservation impact of each decision and each justice’s opinion on it.
In addition to an impressive crop of fulltime faculty members, high-profile visiting professors and adjuncts add to the range of expertise offered at Michigan.
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“The ELPP faculty is remarkable,” says Assistant Professor Kristina Daugirdas, who previously worked as an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of State, “not only for the depth but also the breadth of its collective expertise and experience working with environmental issues from every angle and at every level, from local to international.”
Uhlmann, the former top environmental prosecutor for the Justice Department and now the Jeffrey F. Liss Professor from Practice at Michigan Law, said the project would help voters understand court decisions. “Judicial decisions play a significant role in environmental protection by ensuring that our environmental laws are properly implemented,” Uhlmann said. “The Green Gavels project will provide greater understanding about the role in the decision of the courts in our environmental law system and enable citizens to make choices that better reflect their environmental values.” The Michigan students didn’t participate in the rating process, and the Law School takes no position on any of the justices’ votes. The students instead researched each case and wrote a neutral summary. Those neutral narratives were reviewed by staff attorneys from the Michigan LCV, and they rated each case—and each justice’s vote on each case—as environmentally positive, neutral, or negative. Those ratings were further reviewed by an outside, bipartisan panel. Uhlmann said the panels took great care to ensure that, when a negative “red gavel” was assigned to a justice’s vote, it had been earned. If the law was clear and a justice cast a vote supporting that law, and environmental harm resulted, the fault was with the law itself, not the jurist. In other words, the justice couldn’t receive a red gavel for simply following the law.
Law Quadrangle • Spring 2012
In the past year alone, Michigan Law hosted the 25th Annual Conference of the NAELS, heralded one of the first new journals in more than a decade, the MJEAL, and developed the first-ever judicial accountability project, “Green Gavels,” in conjunction with the Michigan League of Conservation Voters (see related story, at right). In the coming year, Michigan Law students will be eligible to receive $20,000 grants as part of the Dow Sustainability Fellowship Program offered by the University’s Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute.
“Green Gavels pulls back the heavy velvet curtains that have surrounded the Michigan Supreme Court for so long and allows citizens to look objectively at how each decision impacts our air, land, and water,” Michigan LCV Executive Director Lisa Wozniak said when the project was announced earlier this year.
The Green Gavels tool means the state’s judiciary has joined the governor and the legislature on the Michigan LCV website, where those bodies’ environmental and conservation records are also reviewed. Read more at www.michiganlcv.org/greengavels.
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