Robert Lundberg '19

Robert Lundberg, a 2019 UW Law School graduate, is one of 76 attorneys nationally to receive an Equal Justice Works fellowship.

The program allowed Lundberg to create a fellowship of his own design to address legal issues on behalf of the community or cause of his choosing. Lundberg elected to spend his two-year fellowship at Midwest Environmental Advocates in Madison, Wisconsin, where he will work in the areas of environmental justice and Indigenous people's rights.

Lundberg's project will engage Wisconsin Indian Nations by legally and technically assisting an inter-tribal collaboration to address state regulatory failures and protect clean water for generations to come. Long-running failures by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) to properly administer the federal Clean Water Act (CWA) have left critical waters insufficiently protected. Public health, cultural practices and tribal governmental sovereignty are all degraded by WDNR’s failure to comply with the CWA. This particularly harms tribes, who rely on waters for traditional foods and cultural practices.

Lundberg has been interested in and inspired by Midwest Environmental Advocates’s community-centered approach to environmental lawyering since volunteering with them before he attended law school. He sees sustainable relations to water, air, and land as inextricably linked to proper recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and the complicated histories of colonization that continue to reverberate today.

Submitted by Law School News on June 4, 2019

This article appears in the categories: Alumni