Published October 30, 2026 in Bloomberg Law
Bloomberg Law ran an excellent article Friday about the launch of the Institute for Environmental Enforcement at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Here, the first part of the piece:
Prosecutors, regulators, and a law school in New York are joining forces to build a pipeline of environmental enforcement lawyers that can crack down on violators.
The project, set to launch Friday, aims to ramp up the corps of New York’s prosecutors and investigators in response to what they say is a talent gap created at the federal level by the Trump administration. The White House has shed hundreds of lawyers specializing in environmental enforcement from the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, raising concerns among both environmentalists and industry that scofflaws are getting away with harmful pollution.
The new Institute for Environmental Enforcement seeks to train a cadre of lawyers who can handle tricky cases at the federal level, if and when a new administration wants to staff up again.
“We’ve lost a generation of really skilled and experienced environmental enforcement attorneys,” said Steve Solow, a former head of the DOJ’s environmental crime section who’s helping spearhead the effort. “Where will we find the next generation? It’s not as though you can just flick a switch and say, ‘OK, folks, come back and let’s have an environmental criminal enforcement program.’”
The new institute, which will be housed at Pace University’s Haub School of Law, will deliver instruction on how investigators and prosecutors decide which cases to take up, how they carry out investigations, how they bring cases once they have sufficient evidence, and the sanctions and remedies available in a criminal case.
“An environmental prosecutor is a unique lawyer,” said Solow, now director of the environmental enforcement institute at the Haub School. “This is a lawyer with sophisticated understanding not only of the complexities of environmental law, but also of criminal investigation and prosecution.”
The full article is behind a paywall; Bloomberg Law subscribers can read it here: NY Counters Trump-Era Climate Attorney Exodus With New Pipeline.