Abigail Barnes (JD ’16) is one of many SLS students who participate in a full-time clinic course and subsequently return as student attorneys in the advanced program. She writes below sharing experiences from a day in her life as a student in the Winter 2015 Advanced Environmental Law Clinic. 

As a full-time student in the Environmental Law Clinic last fall, I helped investigate and file a challenge to a desalination project being built without the environmental review required by state law in the small town of Cambria, California, for our client, LandWatch San Luis Obispo County. I continued to work on the case as an advanced student, and after the project began operating in January 2015, we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction. The motion had to be sent to the respondent by FedEx’s 8 p.m. cutoff on Wednesday, February 11th.

The motion had been in the works for weeks, starting with drafts by Carolina de Armas and Libby Berardi the full-time clinic students on the case, and yet there was still plenty of last-minute work to do. I ran into Carolina around 8:30 Wednesday morning, and we discussed the priority order for the list of final tasks I had circulated the night before (such as a final check that the exhibit numbers were correctly cited, and making sure that all edits had gotten into the latest draft).

I was back to clinic at 12:45 after my morning class, and the afternoon was something of a blur: the team reviewed final edits from our client and co-counsel, prepared shipping labels and started printing all the exhibits, made a table of authorities, proofread yet again, and sometimes just waited until someone else was out of the draft or another task came up. A last-minute exhibit was added and then taken out again. The printer stopped working briefly, and Carolina ran to the library. Eventually, Carolina, Libby, and I sat with Debbie, our clinic director with the final draft, and went page by page entering any final changes and looking for any lingering typos. We printed copies, I signed the motion and my declaration in support of it, and then rushed to FedEx, making the drop-off with five whole minutes to spare.

It was an eventful day, but just one of many in this case: One month later, I argued the preliminary injunction motion in San Luis Obispo Superior Court.