Environmental Lawyer

Imagine you are in a quiet corner of the Province’s law library researching legal briefs and court transcripts.

You are an environmental lawyer working for the Crown and you are looking for legal precedents to use at an upcoming hearing.

The Province has brought charges against a chemical processing plant for alleged violations of its environmental operating approval licence. The Province granted the company an operating licence that allowed the plant to discharge treated effluent at a specific quantity into the river.

Recent evidence shows the plant was discharging more effluent than its licence allowed. Now, the Province wants to revoke the licence and fine the company to cover the cost of cleanup.

Your job at the hearing will be to present the case to the court in a fair and impartial manner so the judge can decide if there is sufficient evidence to proceed with prosecution.

As an environmental lawyer, you specialize in legal issues regarding provincial and federal environmental regulations.

You have spent weeks preparing this case: gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses, and researching past court decisions.

Because environmental law is such a new specialty, there aren’t many precedents or textbooks you can go to for help. But that just makes the job more interesting because you know that each case you try will be ground-breaking.

At this hearing, you will have to show the judge that the defendant was discharging more effluent than its license allowed. You will introduce testimony from the provincial regulator who first discovered the offence, as well as company employees who will say they were instructed to discharge more effluent, even though it was above the legal limit.

You will also call several investigators to the stand and present physical evidence to refute the company’s claim that it wasn’t discharging more than its limit.

To demonstrate the seriousness of the transgression, there will also be testimony from an environmental toxicologist, an analytical chemist, and a fisheries biologist, who will all tell the court the damage that’s been done to the river ecosystem and how critical a thorough cleanup is.

There’s a huge amount of information to consider in a case like this and it is your job to pull it all together and present it to the court as you work to protect the environment.