Article by Cheryth France, from the River Basin Center, featuring IRIS affiliate Adam Orford
Water has always been an undercurrent in Adam Orford’s life and career. The attorney practically grew up on Alaskan seas. With a penchant for music and languages, his career might have branched a dozen ways, but he now serves as UGA’s environmental law professor.
And it’s all almost by accident.
Needing marketable skills after graduating with a degree in Italian, he applied to law school while teaching English in Sicily. He thought he would try to become a tax lawyer, but became interested in other topics.
“I fell into environmental law in my second year at Columbia Law,” said Orford.
It was 2004, and the school had no environmental law professor. Orford applied to be a student editor at the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law because he cared about the Exxon Valdez oil spill in his home state of Alaska.
“The first article that I worked on was about trans-boundary groundwater management, a kind of groundwater resource management where two or three jurisdictions are involved, their lines drawn across an aquifer,” he shared. It’s a niche of water law with which Georgians are quite familiar—the state was embroiled in ACF water litigation for decades. “It just fascinated me. I ended up becoming the Editor in Chief of the journal, and that started my career.”
His first big break in the field was working for a well-respected environmental lawyer at a large law firm in New York City on superfund cleanups and environmental litigation, sometimes for developers, sometimes for nonprofits. He next moved out west, to a job at a small firm specializing entirely in environmental law, working on an array of issues—including the long-running Klamath Basin adjudication and conflicts over renewable energy development. But after eight years, he withdrew from practicing law, ready for something different.