Widener University School of Law has been named to a national list of “Top Green Schools” based on the strength of Widener’s environmental law curriculum and the school’s earth
-friendly practices.

The honor roll, assembled by National Jurist and preLaw magazines, gave Widener “Magna Cum Laude” status. The list is in preLaw magazine’s “Back to School” issue and in the
September issue of National Jurist, its sister publication “We have a great story to tell here about what we are doing for students, our community activities, our teaching, and our very active scholarship, and we are very happy that these magazines recognized that story,” said Distinguished Professor John C. Dernbach, director of the school’s Environmental Law Center.
National Jurist is written for a law-school audience and is published six times a year by Cypress Magazines in San Diego, Calif. They publish preLaw four times a year for an audience largely made up of undergraduate students and those considering law school. The magazines broke the honor roll into four tiers: summa cum laude, magna cum laude, cum laude and honorable mention. It did not rank them within each tier, instead listing them alphabetically.
Among the things they took into consideration:

• Widener Law has been teaching environmental law since 1986, when there were not yet textbooks on the subject. The faculty has been consistently ahead of the curve in this specialty – teaching climate change since 1994, for example, long before the topic was en vogue and were among the first to do so.

• The Delaware campus celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic in January; the Harrisburg campus launched a clinic last year with help
from a generous gift by the Sierra Club.
• Widener launched the Environmental Law Center, the school’s first academic-civic initiative to operate between both law campuses, in October 2009.
• The school joined the American Bar Association – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Law Office Climate Challenge a year ago, positioning itself as a leader in the greening of U.S.
law schools.

Go to http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/cypress/prelaw_backtoschool-2010/#/10 to see the coverage