BATON ROUGE La. – A Senate committee scuttled a bill Wednesday aimed at shuttering the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic that critics say would have hampered operations at all the state’s law clinics.
The measure would have prohibited university law clinics that get state funding from suing individuals for damages, taking government agencies to court or making constitutional challenges.
Republican Sen. Robert Adley told the Senate Commerce Committee that Tulane accepts around $45 million in state money each year and yet runs a environmental law clinic that runs jobs out of the state by suing industry and government agencies.
Dan Borne, president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, said his organization asked Adley to sponsor the bill after its members were angered by a clinic lawsuit that would require polluters around Baton Rouge to pay millions in fines for noncompliance with ozone standards.
The environmental clinic’s “mission seems to be to attack business advancement and development” in Louisiana, Borne said.
Tulane President Scott Cowen made an impassioned plea against the bill, calling it a “serious black eye” to anyone who supports it. Cowen held the measure would disenfranchise some of the state’s poorest citizens by forcing law clinics to shut their doors.
If Tulane were to decide that state funding was more important than its clinics, the school would be throwing “every indigent person in this state under the bus,” Cowen said. He was addressing a committee room packed with academics, Tulane students and dozens of members of a Vietnamese community in New Orleans East who were represented by Tulane’s environmental law clinic in a bid to stop a landfill in their area.
