Matthew J. Sanders, JD ’02, traces his interest in environmental law to growing up in a small coastal town in Oregon when efforts to save the northern spotted owl from extinction divided his community.

The town was transitioning from a logging economy to one largely tied to tourism, and the owl became a potent symbol for both sides in the debate.

“I knew a lot of people who felt very differently about the same issue,” he says. “That was really formative in my approach to thinking about environmental controversies.”

For years, Sanders has shared that approach—and his experience as an attorney in private practice, local government, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division—with students in Stanford Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic, where he served as a lecturer and acting deputy director. Sanders, who in August was appointed an assistant professor of law and co-director of the clinic with Deborah A. Sivas, JD ’87, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law, plans to play a more prominent role in shaping the clinic’s docket and curriculum.

The appointment cements Sanders’ long-standing connection to the clinic: He was a student in the clinic’s early years, shortly after Sivas joined the faculty in 1997. Sanders says Sivas is “such a force in the environmental law field.”

“I’m very excited about helping even more to direct our docket,” he adds, “and also expanding the suite of skills that students leave our clinic with.”

Path back to the Environmental Law Clinic

Sanders majored in history and minored in environmental studies at Carleton College in Minnesota before joining the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a program analyst. His job—to evaluate how well the agency was enforcing pollution statutes in the country’s upper Midwest—prompted him to attend law school.

“I had seen—growing up, in college, and at the EPA—that judges and lawyers were at the center of a lot of interesting, fraught, challenging issues and problems,” he says.

At Stanford, the Environmental Law Clinic gave him valuable experience working on cases with clients; he externed at the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Justice, as well.

Sanders joined the DOJ as an appellate lawyer in the Environment and Natural Resources Division after graduation and stayed for five years. His career has also included working at two law firms, clerking for Judge Consuelo Callahan (BA ’72) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and serving as a deputy county counsel for the County of San Mateo.

While helping to lead the Environmental Law Clinic, Sanders has worked on all manner of matters, including one of the longest running—a case in which the clinic successfully represented the Pit River Tribe in its efforts to protect the Medicine Lake Highlands from geothermal development.

“I knew a lot of people who felt very differently about the same issue. That was really formative in my approach to thinking about environmental controversies.”

Professor Matthew Sanders, JD ’02

Sanders has also contributed to the clinic’s work on behalf of environmental organizations seeking to protect four species of bumblebee as “fish” under the California Endangered Species Act, which defines fish as “wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, [or] amphibian” (bumblebees, like all insects, are invertebrates). The clinic won on appeal, and, after the California Supreme Court declined to review that decision, the case received national attention, including a bit on The Daily Show. Sanders and Sam Joyce, JD ’23, one of the student attorneys on the matter, were interviewed for the segment on Comedy Central.

“That was the hardest interview I’ve ever done,” Sanders laughs. “Michael Kosta would make these very funny jokes, and, as one does, you either laugh or make a joke back, but the producer kept saying, ‘No, we want you to remain serious.’”

Sanders also tries to make an impact in his research and writing. He has a forthcoming article in the Stanford Law Review that examines the consequences of the administrative-remand rule, which holds generally that only an agency can appeal an order sending an administrative decision back for further review. The rule is meant to prevent parties from appealing issues in a piecemeal manner, but it can have the effect of preventing or unduly delaying further judicial review. The rule has outsize impact in environmental law because so many cases involve administrative agency decisions.

For his article, Sanders reviewed more than 250 U.S. Supreme Court and court of appeal decisions and other sources. He concludes by proposing a series of reforms that would allow the rule to be applied more uniformly across the courts of appeal and allow non-agency appeals in certain instances.

“Basically, I want a clear rule that best balances fairness with judicial efficiency,” he says.

Sanders says he wants his research—like the clinic’s work—to have a practical impact.

“I’m a clinician at heart,” he says. “I’m interested in what I and my students encounter in the practice of law and in trying to improve in concrete ways how our legal system and our laws function.” SL