New Member Profile: Cinnamon Piñon Carlarne
For this issue, our New Member spotlight features Cinnamon Piñon Carlarne. Carlarne was recently named the 19th president and dean of Albany Law School. Before moving to New York, she was an associate dean for faculty and intellectual life at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Carlarne has been a dedicated environmental scholar and advocate since childhood and her career has increasingly focused on climate change on the international stage and on questions of climate and environmental justice.
Cinnamon was born and raised in Texas where her parents instilled the importance of a global perspective and shaped her thinking on the natural environment. Her favorite room in their house was the one with all the National Geographics in it, which undoubtedly inspired much of her devotion to the environment. While she did not come from a family of lawyers, she was always interested in environmental protection and chose law as her path to finding the tools to effect change.
Carlarne stayed in Texas for college, where she graduated from Baylor University and took a wide range of classes including anthropology, environmental studies, and political science. From there she went to the University of California, Berkeley – School of Law for the incredible environmental law programs offered. During her time at Berkeley, she helped form an environmental policy clinic that partnered with an NGO to work on holding large corporations accountable for their adverse environmental and human rights impacts. This work was the beginning of Carlarne’s focus on environmental justice and human rights.
After she graduated from Berkeley, Cinnamon went to the University of Oxford where she studied both international law and environmental change and management. While she did come back to the states after completing her first graduate degree at Oxford to work in Washington D.C., she then had the opportunity to return to academia. Carlarne went back to Oxford for a fellowship in environmental law where she focused on international environmental law and policy.
For the last 12 years, Cinnamon worked at The Ohio State University, Michael E. Moritz College of Law in Columbus, Ohio. At Ohio State, she was a professor and wrote several important publications, including “Climate Courage: Remaking Environmental Law.”1 This impressive article discusses the global crises we are all currently facing and how they intersect; from social, racial, and economic inequality to the ever-present ominous threat of climate change.
Carlarne’s poignant perspective on how climate change is threatening society does have an optimistic takeaway. She states, “However, it also creates opportunities to disrupt persistent patterns of exclusion and inequality as we pursue pathways for just transition. Climate change compels us to rethink the role of environmental law in advancing transformative change.” While environmentalists have been fighting these battles for decades, Carlarne rightfully shines a light on a current silver lining: the increasingly popular movement to implement environmental law in ways that include other progressive reforms. During our interview, we focused heavily on the importance of environmental justice and how New York is leading the way in codifying environmental policies that include disproportionately impacted communities in the conversation.
For example, New York’s Climate Act requires the state to invest or direct resources in a manner designed to ensure that disadvantaged communities receive at least 35%, with the goal of at least 40%, of overall benefits of spending. Policies like these are a perfect example of how environmental law has evolved over the years and now includes those most vulnerable communities as part of the conversation and ensures they are direct beneficiaries of future work. As part of New York’s climate law, the Climate Justice Working Group (CJWG) was established and tasked with finalizing criteria for identifying “disadvantaged communities.”
These criteria will be used to guide equitable implementation and prioritize disadvantaged communities by requiring reductions in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and targeting clean energy and energy efficiency investments. Notably, these criteria served as a model for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative. The CJWG criteria are the perfect example of how environmental law and social justice intersect and how the ripple effect of state policy can impact the national agenda. Now, because of New York, environmental justice considerations are included in plans, proposals, and investments related to climate change at the national level.
While Cinnamon is new to New York, her ideals align perfectly with the policies New Yorkers prioritize. As our New Member spotlight, Dean Carlarne is a welcomed addition to our group and we are lucky to have her global environmental expertise. Carlarne was excited to join the Environmental and Energy Law Section because having a community that is invested in doing this work in a time when the momentum is on the environment’s side is as important to her as it is to us.
