Another Notable CLIPI Legacy: Its People

Shortly after we founded CLIPI in 1972, we created a fellowship program—bringing recent law graduates to work with us right out of school.

I'll be honest, we thought we staff attorneys would train them. But really, we were all making it up as we went along. They trained alongside us.

At our UCLA event celebrating CLIPI's archives, I looked out at the room and saw so many of those former fellows:

Mary Nichols—who became one of the world's foremost experts on air quality, leading the California Air Resources Board and shaping global climate policy.

Brenda Jackson Drake—our very first fellow in 1975, who was my event co-host alongside her husband, Michael Drake, President Emeritus of the University of California.

Geoffrey Cowan, Ann Carlson, Felicia Marcus, Joel Reynolds, Lucas Guttentag, Fred Woocher, and so many others who went on to lead environmental organizations, become law school deans, serve in presidential administrations, and continue fighting for the public good.

During his presentation, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky emphasized during the panel: "The role that CLIPI played in training a generation—in fact, a few generations—of public interest lawyers. So many individuals went to work for CLIPI as fellows and then had incredibly distinguished careers."

My co-founder John Phillips observed: "I think we probably had more women fellows than men over the years. Why? Because it was a competition on merit. They were the best we could hire, and they've done very well."

This was during a time when women couldn't even get interviews at major firms. Sandra Day O'Connor, a Stanford Law graduate, couldn't get an interview. O'Melveny & Myers, where we worked before starting CLIPI, had just under 100 lawyers when we began in 1969—all white males.

The cases mattered. The precedents mattered. The laws we helped pass mattered.

And CLIPI’s people, who’ve grown, succeeded, and carried this public interest work forward for decades—that legacy gives us pride and meaning.

The archives at UCLA will preserve the cases. But CLIPI’s legacy also includes the people out there changing the world and the future generations that will be inspired by them.