Clem Shute to be honored by California bar

Boalt alum will follow Joe Sax as second recipient of environmental law lifetime achievement award

This just in, courtesy of Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger — Clem Shute (Boalt ’64) will be honored this fall with the second Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Field of Environmental Law. (The first Award, of course, went to the late Joe Sax.)

Clem richly deserves this prestigious award. He has been a major player in California environmental law and policy since the dawn of the environmental era. As an Assistant Attorney General for California, he helped build what has become one of the strongest public environmental law shops in the nation. He then co-founded Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, which pioneered the concept of a private-sector, public-interest focused boutique practice in land use and environmental law. He helped launch the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, an innovative cross-state planning institution, and currently sits on its Governing Board. He has long been a leading defender of the authority of the government to regulate land use, and managed to get all 9 Supreme Court justices to sign on to a strong endorsement of that authority in Agins v. City of Tiburon, 447 U.S. 255 (1980).

Importantly, Clem has also been a great teacher and mentor to any number of young and aspiring lawyers, including me. I learned a lot from him, about the law and about professionalism, when I was a law clerk at Shute Mihaly many years ago. Congratulations to Clem!