Authors: Natalie Gustin and EECJ Fellows

Temple Law, meet Natalie Gustin (LAW ’29)! She is a 1L who hails from Maryland and loves a good high-drama torts case. Her path to environmental law stems from her work in disability rights and her family roots in Vietnam and Iowa. Read on to learn her story.

Where do you call home? 

Anne Arundel County, Maryland

What were you up to before law school? 

I just graduated from undergrad in May! During undergrad, I worked in disability rights and in homelessness advocacy in DC. 

What sparked your interest in environmental law? Tell us your origin story. 

I actually entered the environmental law space via disability law. As a disabled person, I spent much of my academic career before law school trying to understand who becomes “disabled” (both physically and politically) and why. The environment, as most of us know, plays an outsized role in health outcomes. In my own family, which has roots in Iowa and Vietnam, the impact of negative environmental policies is demonstrated generationally. In Iowa, poorly regulated pesticide and herbicide use and towns centered around factory work have led to one of the highest cancer rates in the country. In Vietnam, generations of Vietnamese people (and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam veterans) have been diagnosed with cancer, birth defects, and other disabilities as a direct result of the US government’s use of Rainbow Herbicides to destroy millions of acres of Vietnamese rainforests. These two vastly different places—the rural Midwest and Southeast Asia—are connected by policies that decided the inhabitants and ecosystems of those areas were expendable. 

It is thus anyone’s duty, whether interested in health, racial justice, international human rights, or economic injustice, to be concerned with environmental law (or lack thereof), and vice versa. Factories and data centers built in low-income Black neighborhoods, farm workers collapsing due to higher temperatures and abusive working conditions, indigenous crops in Palestine razed and the stewards of the land killed to further the genocide—these environmental and health crises do not happen in a bubble, but as a direct result of corporate and governmental policies that sacrifice lives for profit. Health, economic, environmental, and racial injustice cannot be targeted in isolation, but as intertwined systemic issues, and I hope to draw deeper connections between them in my legal practice. 

Is law school less scary, scarier, or just as scary as you imagined? 

The readings are less scary, the classes are less scary, the people are less scary, but the skills I have to practice and develop are just as scary as I imagined… public speaking on the spot and adversarial discussions are not yet my strong suit. 

Favorite 1L class? 

Torts for sure. I love the drama. 

Looking ahead at the next three years, what are you most hyped about? 

I’m most excited to start doing clinics and get out into the community to do real work with the things I’m learning. 

If you will allow us one corny, hippy-dippy question—what activity makes you feel most connected to the planet? 

I love finishing awful, arduous, hours-long solo hikes, and I love complaining during them. The feeling of reaching the top of a mountain or the end of a ten-mile hike after forcing myself not to turn around is the best, and I appreciate the nature around me so much more on the way down. 

What’s one thing most people don’t know that you think everyone should know?

In Pennsylvania, it’s illegal for a fortune teller to charge you money to tell you about your future. 

Favorite piece of legal pop culture and/or fictional lawyer? 

I am an unabashed lover of the 1957 legal drama 12 Angry Men.

Dogs or cats? 

Dog person outside my house, cat person inside my house. 

Sweet or savory? 

Savory!

Finally, and most importantly – would you rather (1) have Cheetos fingers for the rest of your life (as in Cheetos dust is caked onto your fingers for the rest of your life and you can never wash it off) or (2) have Cheetos dust around the corners of your mouth for the rest of your life?

Cheetos fingers for the rest of my life.