Interview with Senior Litigation Attorney, Alex Bomstein
Interview with Alex Bomstein, Esq., Senior Litigation Attorney
- Where are you from and what’s your background?
I was born and spent the first year of my life in Philly, and then grew up just north of the city in Cheltenham Township. Philly’s my home, and I was excited to move back right after graduating law school
- How long have you been with the Council?
It’ll be seven years in January!
- What’s your expertise you bring to the Council? How do you use it to fight for a cleaner environment?
I’ve been playing some role in the work to defend the earth for most of my life, though I’m much more effective at it now than when I was planting trees in the high school courtyard. I earned my litigation chops doing commercial litigation at a big firm, but joining the Council and jumping into environmental law required climbing up a steep learning curve. Now, my job entails managing cases and filing briefs but also a lot more than that. I talk with our partners on the front lines about how the law affects them. I coordinate with our peer groups in our campaigns. I urge agencies to regulate better. I communicate to the public the importance of this work and try to render legalese in plain English. The Council is a small shop and we need to do a lot!
- What’s kept you motivated and invested all these years in environmental legal fights (esp. when legal battles are long-term, intensive, and emotionally draining)?
The hardest thing in public interest environmental law is staying in the game though the deck is stacked against you every time. I have had losses that absolutely drained the life out of me and made me question my career choices. A loss in this field means the loss of life–wildlife and human life–and the loss of irreplaceable places. But the bigger losses are those we are guaranteed to experience if we never try at all. Because I love life in all its forms, I can’t give up. In the last two weeks as I write this, we’ve just won an incredible string of victories that were years in the making. We just have to power through the bad times to make it to the good ones.
- What’s the biggest challenge to winning legal victories for the environment?
It’s that stacked deck I mentioned! We are fighting against the deeply ingrained assumption people have that if a big corporation with a lot of employees is making money on some business venture, it’s probably more or less fine, or at most needs some polishing around the edges. But we are in the midst of, and causing, the greatest climatic and ecological crisis humanity has seen. For judges to continue casually ignoring the environmental protection laws in favor of the laissez-faire status quo just doesn’t cut it anymore.
- What’s the most promising change(s) you’ve seen in court recently that shifts the environmental movements progress forward?
In the last few years, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has started to take the Environmental Rights Amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution seriously; that is, it has started to issue rulings interpreting the guarantees to clean air and pure water and to the preservation of our natural resources to mean just what they say rather than interpreting them to mean nothing. That may sound very basic and obvious, but it’s actually a huge shift. If every court and agency and forum simply interpreted our environmental laws the same way–as what they plainly say, rather than as nothing–it would be nothing short of revolutionary.
- What legal battles would you be thrilled to win? Why?
We have many plans, but the Council is my client and as a lawyer I need to keep its secrets!
