Jessica C. Landman, J.D.

Research

Jessica Landman is an expert on environmental law consulting with the Council Fire team on broad-based natural resources and oceans conservation. She previously oversaw European conservation efforts at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and directed its work to restore fisheries in several countries in Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, and Myanmar. She was also EDF’s senior director of Fish Forever, a partnership with the University of California at Santa Barbara and the conservation group Rare that is working toward recovery of small-scale coastal fisheries through co-management and secure tenure, using scalable tools and social marketing techniques. Through her Pew fellowship, Landman used legal expertise to place pressure on two industrial plants that were releasing large amounts of toxic wastewater into Florida’s fragile waterways and ecosystems. Landman’s goal was to use nontraditional negotiations as well as state and federal legal procedures to ensure that stringent pollution limits required under the Clean Water Act (CWA) would be put in place and enforced. She negotiated directly with the polluting companies, with the goal of achieving a positive outcome while avoiding expensive and time-consuming litigation. This resulted in an agreement from the companies to explore other ways to reduce the toxicity and quantity of wastewater. Ultimately, they refused to implement any changes voluntarily. The extent of Florida’s disregard for water pollution laws unveiled by these permit challenges ultimately led Landman and her partners to file an administrative petition and a federal lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to withdraw Florida’s legal authority to run the state’s CWA permitting program. Meanwhile, three other lawsuits over the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s and the EPA’s failure to implement and enforce the CWA in Florida, in which Landman played a supporting role, have resulted in landmark victories.

To learn more about Landman, visit her bio online: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-landman-4a943530.