Going Green: Oday Salim works with Michigan Law students to amend city code
Oday Salim. (Photo courtesy of Oday Salim)
As the legal community looks for more ways to support sustainability (see “Future Forward,” page 52), Oday Salim and his students at the University of Michigan Law School have launched a new partnership with the city of Dearborn to create a healthier and more sustainable environment for its residents.
Salim is the director of Michigan Law’s Environmental Law and Sustainability Clinic, which in January 2024 began reviewing Dearborn’s ordinances and policies to identify barriers to renewable energy infrastructure and stormwater management. As part of their pro bono services, students in the clinic recommend how the city can best address regulatory barriers.
“It’s great for the students,” says Salim, who also is co-director of Michigan Law’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. “We can make a big difference because we’re impacting the ordinances of a very populous city with thousands of people, all of whom could be positively impacted by changes that Dearborn ultimately makes in its code.”
Samir Deshpande helped facilitate the relationship between the city and Michigan Law as part of his work as Dearborn’s environmental health manager. Deshpande collaborated with several groups of students and credits Salim for encouraging them to think outside the box.
The city was “able to take advantage of their creativity and their willingness to be open to and entertain new ideas, new means of how to answer a problem or approach a solution,” says Deshpande, who now is a senior project consultant with nonprofit organization Elevate. “That ability to think very broadly, that’s something that Oday encourages quite a bit.”
Impacting the community
As a kid growing up in the Detroit area, Salim watched TV news coverage of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain his country’s southern marshlands to punish their native inhabitants for rebelling against his regime.
Salim, whose family left Iraq and sought political asylum in the United States when he was 2, continued to follow the story of the marshlands and their gradual devastation as a teenager and young adult. In 2016, the partially recovered marshlands were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“It made me think a lot about the reliance that we have on natural resources and the way that governments make decisions about natural resources and how that can impact the community,” Salim says.
Salim kept that interest while earning his bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish from Wayne State University in 2001 and his master’s degree in English and critical theory from the University of Illinois in 2004. Rather than pursue a PhD in humanities, Salim decided to go to law school and focus on environmental law.
He graduated from Wayne State University Law School in 2008 and received his LLM in natural resources and environmental law from Lewis & Clark Law School in 2009. He began applying to law firms in California, but he also had developed a passion for teaching while in graduate school. When a staff attorney position opened at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law’s Environmental Law Clinic, he took it.
“I thought it would give me an opportunity to begin this combination of practicing environmental law and teaching,” Salim says. “And it had the added bonus of doing public interest work and representing organizations and individuals that otherwise would not have access to legal representation.”
In his career, Salim has practiced environmental law in both Pennsylvania and Michigan. As an adjunct professor, he taught energy law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Wayne State University Law School, and oil and gas law at Lewis & Clark Law School.
In 2018, Salim joined Michigan Law, where he and his students in the Environmental Law and Sustainability Clinic represent the National Wildlife Federation in matters involving public lands, energy, and water and wildlife resources in the Great Lakes watershed. They also handle litigation, transactions and policy issues for other nonprofit and governmental clients.
Much of the clinic’s work includes an environmental justice component, Salim adds.
“We are often trying to figure out ways that we can protect the environment and provide access to natural resources and manage the climate in ways that support the most vulnerable communities,” says Salim, who teaches environmental justice and water law as an adjunct professor at Michigan Law.
Debra Chopp, Michigan Law’s associate dean for experiential education, notes that students in the Environmental Law and Sustainability Clinic once focused solely on litigation for the National Wildlife Federation. But after Salim took over as its director, he emphasized the importance of building and diversifying the clinic’s caseload.
“The Dearborn case is such a nice example of using environmental law to achieve social justice,” Chopp says. “That would not have happened before. It’s all because of him and his ideas about how to make the most of this clinic to teach our students and to serve the community.”
Building resources
Fady Shehadeh is one of the Michigan Law students who worked with Salim to review Dearborn’s ordinances and policies last fall.
Shehadeh initially concentrated on proposed amendments to the city code that would expand access to green stormwater infrastructure, which captures and manages stormwater runoff using plants and natural materials.
After a new state law involving changes to the permitting process for large-scale wind, solar and energy projects went into effect in November, Shehadeh researched how it could impact Dearborn’s ability to better support renewable energy.
“There is nothing better than getting hands-on experience and actually doing the work,” says Shehadeh, who is set to graduate this spring. “I was able to say I have my own client, and they are coming to us with questions and relying on us to help them with problems.
“And professor Salim, I’ve got to give it to him,” Shehadeh says. “He guides you but lets you figure out the answers on your own. And if you come up with something that’s not the way he would have thought of it, he lets you explore that avenue.”
Salim, who lives outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife and 2-year-old twins, serves as chair of the ABA Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice’s Environmental Justice Committee. In 2018, he was named to the Grist 50, a list of innovators who do high-impact work in the sustainability space.
Grist recognized Salim for his efforts to increase environmental and public health protection for minority communities, which he says included encouraging Michigan’s environmental agency to translate announcements for residents who speak Arabic as their first language.
Salim describes environmental law as ever-changing, as Congress and state legislatures continually enact new statutes to address the environment, natural resources and energy in different ways. He appreciates working in an area that often delivers measurable results.
“If you’re working on a pollution case, and you’re successful, you can see a reduction in pollution and an improvement in the health of that impacted community,” Salim says. “If you’re working on making water and energy rates more affordable, you can see water bills and energy bills decreasing because of the policy work you do.”
Salim, who spends a lot of time outside with his family, adds that his job allows him to get up from his desk and out on a hiking trail or into a park.
“It’s great fun to get out there and actually see the resources that we’re working to protect,” he says.
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