Megan Lemon ’26, Professor Cale Jaffe ’01 and Irène P. Mathieu spoke at an event marking Earth Day at UVA Law.
On Earth Day, clinicians, professors and students came together to discuss the current state of youth climate advocacy. Students with two organizations — Child Advocacy Research and Education (CARE) and the Virginia Environmental Law Forum (VELF) — jointly sponsored this event to learn more about Our Children’s Trust, a legal advocacy organization focused on securing legal rights to a safe climate for future generations.
Professor and PLACE Co-Director Cale Jaffe and student Megan Lemon ’26 discussed the strategies, litigation tactics and overall goals for youth climate litigation efforts in Montana and Virginia. These two case studies had different end results, but both serve as lessons for the importance of this type of litigation, and the difficulties that legal activists continue to face.
Megan worked on an amicus brief in support of Our Children’s Trust efforts in Virginia through the Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic. She shared that at their core, these youth legal challenges are designed not only to change the law but also to amplify the issue of climate change and ensure the public is aware of the long-lasting impact that the decisions we make now will have on future generations.
Professor Jaffe remarked that “working on these issues is exciting for law students because there are 50 states with different constitutions and different legal standards, and that makes challenges and opportunities in each specific state unique and exciting.”
From a clinical perspective, Irène P. Mathieu, M.D., MPH, discussed the science that underpins these legal efforts and the health impacts of climate change on America’s youth. She discussed how medical research has shown that early childhood is an important time during which the impacts of heat, air pollution and other toxin exposure can affect youth development and manifest in long-term impacts.
As a board member of Virginia Clinicians for Climate Action, she shared different strategies from lobbying to volunteering in a nonlegal capacity and expanding cross-disciplinary engagement between lawyers, scientists and doctors to help spread research on climate change. One way she personally has helped to spread this knowledge and engagement is as an eco-poet, using prose and poetry to combine and capture the deeply emotional aspects of climate change with the physical and mental health science she works on every day.
On this Earth Day, students at UVA Law had the chance not only to think through how best to use their legal talents to advocate for the planet and the next generation, but to take a holistic approach in understanding the interdisciplinary challenges of working with youth plaintiffs in cases involving, science, environmental policy and the law.