Transcription of Sarah Schindler for the show Sustainability Ed #189
Lisa: Today on Love Maine Radio, we have with us Sarah Schindler. Sarah is a professor at Maine Law who is quickly earning a national reputation for her scholarship, which focuses on the intersection of sustainable development and land use. At Maine Law, Sarah teaches property, land use, local government, real estate transactions, and animal law. She is also a musician skilled at playing multiple instruments and an avid urban cyclist.
Thanks so much for coming in.
Sarah: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Sarah, your name has come up a lot lately here at Maine Magazine and Old Port Magazine and just in general. There is something about you, I guess, that people are starting to talk about. I know you recently did a TEDx talk.
Sarah: I did.
Lisa: Why is it that people are so interested all of a sudden on things like sustainable development and land use?
Sarah: That’s a good question. I think there’s a few issues. I think in Portland right now we’re seeing something that perhaps we haven’t really seen in many of our lifetimes living here, which is a renewed interest in development on the peninsula. I think that’s getting a lot of people talking about what we want our city to look like. There’s an idea that we need more housing. A lot of my friends who are renters especially, but also folks who are trying to buy homes are finding that it’s too expensive. They have to go off the peninsula; they can’t even find an apartment within their price range. There’s this recognition that rent’s getting high, there aren’t enough places available, and so we need development, especially middle-income housing.
At the same time, I think we’re feeling a pushback from some people who are saying, “Whoa, we don’t want our city to change too much.” I think in the abstract, a lot of people think that density is a good thing. If we build up instead of out, we can avoid sprawl, we can concentrate creative people in an urban environment, and that’s what we want. We hear all about how density is good and from an environmental perspective it’s good to have more people concentrated where the services are and decrease the reliance on cars and all this, but when it comes down to having a 10-story building next to your single-family home, people start feeling differently.
I think there’s a conflict there right now in Portland between what we think or say we want and what we actually want in our neighborhoods. I think people are starting to explore those feelings and explore what it will mean for the city of Portland, especially the peninsula, as more and more development is proposed and created, as our city becomes more interesting to tourists, to wealthy people, to creative people, to young people, folks who want to be here that are going to need places to live and places to work if they come. I think that’s definitely going on right now in the city of Portland.
I guess the other thing I would say is a lot of my research and work also focuses on urban sustainability in the context of food and food systems. As we know, food in Portland is a huge topic. We have more and more restaurants opening each year, great restaurants that are getting rave reviews from national publications. There’s also a lot of folks who are moving into the farming sphere, so there’s a lot of discussion around what we want our food laws and food regulations to be, how restrictive, how can we be local and still be looking out for our health and safety and things like that.
Lisa: What you’re talking about really is the very definition of sustainability, which is able to do something over the longer term that’s going to be beneficial to all involved. It’s not the flash-in-the-pan recycle our tin can today; it’s how do we plan forward so that we can make things good for everybody.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s definitely true. Right, thinking about not just what’s going to satisfy folks right now or next year or the year after, but what’s going to work 10, 20, 50 years out as well.
Lisa: You take a very personal approach to sustainability. You’re a vegan. You’re an urban cyclist. You’re really trying to practice what you teach. Why make those choices? How did you come to that place where you said, “Okay, I’m going to do this personally, I’m going to do this professionally. This is important to me?”
Sarah: I guess in my mind there’s never been a separation between the personal and the professional, and maybe that’s why I got into this field from a professional standpoint, because for me … I became a vegetarian when I was 5 and sort of slowly progressed toward veganism when I was around 20 or 21. For me, that was always a very personal choice. It’s my view of the world and my view of animals and my feelings about humanity and humaneness and ethics and morals and all of these things. I guess that was a decision in my personal life, but for me, my professional life needed to reflect those viewpoints.
I was a lawyer in San Francisco for about 5 years before moving here, and in that job I worked for a big corporate defense firm in the environmental and land use group. I remember when I started in that practice group, I said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to have to say no sometimes. If a project or a client comes up that I don’t feel good about, I’m going to tell my bosses I can’t work on it.” That did happen a few times. My firm represented the meat industry basically in a lawsuit, and I said, “I can’t work on that case.” The firm also represented some clients who were doing greenfield development, suburban single-family home development, and I also said I wouldn’t work on those cases.
I was able to do that because I worked really hard on other cases and projects, especially urban infill development projects. Of course, there you get some moral or ethical questions surrounding gentrification. That’s the big issue as opposed to environmentalism from the land perspective, you’re dealing with it from a human-centered perspective. Those were issues I had to confront, but for me, I felt more comfortable confronting those issues and working out with my clients a balance of how do we provide for the existing community as well as create this new development that we want to bring into existing communities.
Lisa: My observation of the law is that it is a lot less cut and dried than people believe it to be. I think of myself going into medicine, at one point thought, “I’m going to go into medicine because then I’ll know things. I’ll be able to tell people this is right and this is wrong, do this, don’t do this.” Being close to people in my life who are lawyers, who are attorneys, it seems very similar. There’s case law, there’s stuff that tells us this is what’s right and what’s wrong, but there’s a lot of interpretation. What has that been like for you? You seem so strongly principled to have to, I don’t know, sit through that.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think I first got a sense of that … I clerked for a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas, after law school. It was interesting because the judge was a conservative judge, a Reagan appointee, and I was very progressive. I remember being curious that he hired me in the first place. It was like, “Oh, why does this guy want my opinions on things?” One of the things I learned was that a lot of cases, no matter what your political perspective, you’re going to come out the same way when you actually look at the case law or the statutes or the history of how the statute was created. Even though we might not know the answer just by looking at it abstractly, when you really dig down and do the research, there is often an answer that makes sense no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.
Where that gets mixed up, I think, in some cases is when you get up to the issues that are coming before the Supreme Court and as we see, oftentimes we can tell right off the bat who’s going to vote which way based on their political leanings. I think that’s why we have a sense that the law isn’t clear and a lot of it really does depend on the judge’s perspective. Again, that’s often true. It depends on the issue; it depends on the case; it depends on how much room for interpretation there is. It is funny, because I think a lot of people assume because you’re a lawyer, they say, “Oh, I have this issue, this real estate issue. Here it is. What’s the answer?” The answer is, “I don’t know.” First, you have to do the research.
A lot of what we’re seeing nowadays is still very unknown because it’s areas of law that are evolving. For example, in the real estate realm, the development realm, the sharing economy. We’re seeing the rise in Airbnb, we’re seeing the rise in Uber, in pop-up restaurants, all of these things that are not something that we traditionally regulated. I think the government, both local government and state and federal government, are having a hard time figuring out what are those things. Do we continue to regulate them just like we regulated industrial or commercial uses in the past or do we have to recognize that this is a new, evolving, somewhat more communitarian form of commerce? If so, does that mean it needs a different regulatory structure? I think the answer is yes, but there’s still a lot of unknowns around that because it’s new.
Lisa: San Francisco, Portland, I think in many ways they’re very different, in many ways they’re very similar, though. In the time I’ve spent in San Francisco, it almost seems as if Portland could evolve in that direction. What have you found?
Sarah: Yeah. I think there are definitely a lot of similarities, and that’s one of the reasons that when I was on the job market, when I came here for my interview, I really liked Portland. I felt very connected to it, even though I had never been here before, because I felt that it had a very similar ethic and similar ideals to San Francisco. The biggest difference is obviously the scale. It’s much easier to live here than it was in San Francisco. At the same time, the flip side of that is you don’t have quite as much happening. There’s not quite as much culture, there’s not quite as much energy, there’s not quite as much activism. It still exists, it’s just on a smaller scale. That was one of the biggest differences for me is that in San Francisco sometimes you’re overwhelmed by choices and possibilities. Whereas here, there’s, “Oh, this is the interesting thing that’s happening tonight that I want to take part in.”
Yeah, I definitely think the ideals of the people are the same. One of the nice things is, even though San Francisco you’re so close to mountains and water there, it’s so hard to get out. For me, I was working all the time and then getting in my car and driving across the bridge and sitting in traffic, it just often wasn’t worth it. I’d rather just walk down the street and go to a concert. Whereas here it’s so easy to get out of town and I think there’s a strong desire. You see people actually doing that here, not just talking about it but doing it. That’s been inspiring to me. I’ve really reconnected with my roots, which were being into nature and being into hiking and rock climbing and all of these things in a way that when I was living in San Francisco I let go because it was much more about city living.
Lisa: Describe to me what it was about being a law professor that appealed to you. It sounds like this might have been something you thought about pretty early on. A lot of people, they think I want to be an attorney or I want to be a professor. They don’t necessarily think about that specific job choice in the middle.
Sarah: Yeah. I’m trying to think when it began. I was a TA, a teaching assistant, during law school and I really liked that. I felt like I had some skill at explaining difficult concepts to my classmates or to the underclassmen. I think maybe that’s when I started to think about it in a real way, as in this could be something I’m really interested in. I also really loved law school. I thought it was so interesting, the way of thinking, reading cases, thinking about the policy behind them. That was all very appealing to me.
I had definitely thought about going and getting my PhD instead of going to law school, which could have also led to teaching, but it was much more unformed. I was young; I didn’t really know what that would entail. When I was in law school, I had that experience that made me think, “Oh, teaching would be interesting,” but at that point, I had already made the decision. I turned down some of the fancier schools to come back to Georgia, which is where I grew up, and they paid for me to go to law school. It was a great deal for me, but I started thinking, “Oh, maybe I’ve limited myself,” because looking into it, most of my professors had gone to Harvard and Yale and Stanford, which is common in the field. It was in the back of my mind, but something I didn’t necessarily think was realistic.
At the same time, I knew I wanted to make a difference in the world. I had these lofty ideals that I think many law students come with, which is, “I want to change the world, and the way to do that is figuring out the system and then working from within the system to change it.” That was what I thought I would do. I remember when I was in practice still thinking that teaching, that being a law professor would be really fun. I remember I once mentioned this to … They assigned us a mentor at the law firm, this female attorney who was one of my bosses effectively, and I told her … She asked me, “What’s your 5-year plan?” I said, “I’d really like to write a big article and maybe become a law professor.” She was like, “Oh, well, then I’m not going to give you anymore work if you’re just planning to leave in 5 years.” It was a very odd experience when I learned about, oh, mentoring isn’t always what you might think it is.
Anyway, when I was practicing as a lawyer, I started doing some adjunct teaching at UC Berkeley and UC Hastings, which were the 2 closest law schools. I started teaching the animal law class there as a substitute basically for the fellow who taught it. Whenever he had a trial to attend, I would sub for him. I got really great feedback from the students. They said, “You’re great. You should be our teacher all the … We like you just as much as the real guy.” That gave me, I think, a lot of confidence.
I had been in touch with some of my law professors from law school and I expressed these interests to them that I was thinking about it. They told me, “Oh, you should apply for this fellowship we have. We have a fellowship where we will hire someone for a year. If we think they have a chance of doing a good job as a law professor, we’ll groom you and you’ll get to teach a class and write a paper.” I applied for that fellowship back at the University of Georgia and got it. That was a great experience, so I went back there for a year and was immersed in the world of academia and got my bearings and then went on the teaching market and, yeah, wound up here.
Lisa: I love that story in part because when I chose family medicine and I was a resident, I quickly realized that I really enjoyed other aspects of family medicine, not just clinical work, which I think is probably the equivalent of legal practice. I remember vividly having a conversation with one of my fellow residents that night that I had just… “I’m not sure I want to do full-time clinical work. I think I want to teach and I think I want to write.” The response was very similar. The response was very, “Oh, my gosh, this isn’t …” It’s almost like you’re being a traitor in some ways because this is the path that they’ve chosen and your path is different.
I’m thinking it must have been so gratifying to dig into what you really wanted to do, to what you really felt passionate about, and have people say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. This is exactly what you should be doing.” To be able to follow it through, I guess, to the conclusion that you should be a law professor.
Sarah: Yeah. No, definitely. Again, it’s one of those things where when you think something is unlikely and then it happens, it’s even more exciting. For me, it was really gratifying and then to have had success as a law professor has also been very gratifying, showing that you don’t have to have gone to Yale to do it. It’s still more likely. It’s an easier path, certainly, if you do go to one of the elite schools because it’s more of a feeder system, but other paths are possible and I think that’s nice to remember.
Lisa: It’s so, I think, helpful that you have the ability to communicate at different levels. You can speak to other lawyers, you can speak to law students, you can speak to the general public in a TEDx talk. I think that that’s more and more important, and we’ve spoken to other guests, say, in the medical, the biomedical research field, and they have to be able to do that. We all have to be able to speak a language that other people from other areas can understand now.
Sarah: Yeah, I agree. I think that I’m seeing this more and more with younger law professors. I think there was the sense with some of the older generation that they were very much about their research and focused and writing for other law professors. There’s still a lot of that. In my published work, the audience is definitely … I guess I would say I try to make the audience more broad than some do. I try to write not just for legal academics but also for courts and also for community activists.
I want to write in a way that does speak to all people, because my goal is with my research that I want it to have a real world impact. I think there is the sense that some legal scholarship is so esoteric. You’re writing about historical elements of some statute that no one’s looked at for 50 years, and it doesn’t necessarily speak to the public in the same way. I think there’s value in that kind of scholarship as well, but what I try to do is different. I think you’re right; I think there’s more of a push. As I said, I’m seeing that more with a lot of my junior colleagues, which is, “Let’s write stuff that’s actually applicable to people, that’s going to make a change in our communities.”
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Lisa: I know having 2 brothers that are attorneys that we’re still in this time where finding a job as an attorney isn’t necessarily a guarantee, that you really have to go to law school because you love the law, study as hard as you can, make the connections that you can, and then hope that you’re going to find a good job that you really like. What’s that like to be a law professor during this kind of era in history?
Sarah: Yeah. I would say that that’s changing. I feel like post-recession more jobs are coming back. We’re seeing firms hire more. We’re seeing more people need legal work. As I was talking about with development in Portland, suddenly now there’s all this development. We certainly need legal work to accompany that, so I do think it’s changing. Also, in Maine we’re lucky in some senses. I don’t know if we’d say lucky, but there’s this large area of Maine, northern Maine and Down East where a lot of the bar, the attorneys are older and they’re going to be retiring in a few years, so there’s a strong need for legal work up in that part of the state, but again, not everyone necessarily wants to be there.
I take your general point as valid. It’s not as easy as perhaps it once was or at least the idea once was that you just go to law school and then you get a job making $100,000 a year. I think what I’ve tried to do, what we try to encourage our students to do is think more entrepreneurially. The only path is not, for example, the path I took. You don’t have to go to law school and then work at a big law firm. There are a lot of other things you can do with a law degree. As you said, first of all, the education itself is really fascinating. It teaches you to think in this entirely new way, and you gain a lot from that experience. Maine Law specifically is a great deal. It’s one of the most low-cost law schools in the country, and it has great professors.
I think that the experience of law school itself is valuable, but then when they get out, when the students get out, there is actually a lot that you can do with that law degree. Having a law degree will help you more than had you not had it. I always tell my students, especially in the land use and real estate fields, there’s so many things other than just being a lawyer that are needed. Development groups need attorneys often or project managers, where having legal background is very helpful. Cities need attorneys to work on projects, to help with permitting. In states where there’s a big environmental review process behind development work, you need folks to do the environmental review and do the analysis.
At the same time, we’re having a lot of our students go out and hang their own shingle and start their own firms. I am always impressed with the students who do that because I personally am very non-entrepreneurial. I need a little box and someone telling me what to do. That’s sort of how I’ve always been. Seeing all of these students with just these ideas and going out there and putting them into practice is really inspiring to me. Yeah, it makes me excited for them. I think that’s part of it is just really encouraging that non-traditional thinking. At the law school, we’re talking about partnering with the business school and some other programs to really help students develop those entrepreneurial pathways.
Lisa: You’re obviously in the earlier stages of your career. You’re young, which is a compliment.
Sarah: Thank you.
Lisa: You seem very passionate about what you’re doing. Do you have some sense for what path you’d like your life to take? Are you kind of firmly ensconced in what it is that you feel like you’re meant to be doing or do you have thoughts of the future?
Sarah: I think one of the nice things about being a law professor and especially a tenured law professor is it gives you the freedom to explore new areas. For me, this space that I write and research in has been my passion for a long time, so I don’t necessarily see myself straying very far from it, but I do like the possibility or like the idea that I have the possibility to expand if I want to. I definitely think maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll do more speaking endeavors or events to try to share ideas and thoughts with folks around issues of sustainability or local foods.
I would definitely say I don’t anticipate leaving the field of academia or being a law professor because it really is … It’s the best job I’ve ever had. I love it. I remember before, when I was a lawyer, I would sometimes cry under my desk at work and think, “Why am I doing this to myself?” That’s so sad to me now to think back on those times. I just didn’t believe that people really loved their jobs. I thought it was just something sometimes people said, that no one could really love their jobs. Maybe they don’t hate it, but they might not love it. Once I got into this field, I realized, wow, I love this and I’m excited to go to work every day. I don’t know that I would find that somewhere else, so I feel very lucky.
Lisa: Obviously, as a tenured law professor, I am not in any way saying, “You’re so young.” I’m just saying the passion, the enthusiasm, you’re somebody who is … You’re very firmly in your career.
Sarah: Yes.
Lisa: You still have so much momentum.
Sarah: Yeah.
Lisa: I guess that was where my question was coming from.
Sarah: Yeah. I hope I keep that up. This is my sixth year teaching, seventh if I consider my fellowship as well, and I definitely still have a lot of passion for the subjects, but sometimes you come in and you’re, oh, teaching this case again and there are certain cases that I teach in multiple classes. I’ve taught this case 15 times and will I still have this energy and enthusiasm for it when I’m at the end of my career or even in the middle of my career? I hope the answer is yes. I think that sometimes you do need to do things to shake it up and teach a different case one year Yeah, no, I have always been a very energetic person, so I hope that that does continue throughout my career.
Lisa: I suspect that it will. Sarah, how do people find out about the work that you’re doing or about University of Maine Law School?
Sarah: We have a website. Google Maine Law and it’s the University of Maine School of Law. There are links there to most of the papers that I’ve written, which, as I said, I try to write for not only an academic audience but for a general audience as well. Yeah, that’s where they can find information about what I’m working on and what other folks at the law school are working on as well.
Lisa: They can also Google TEDxDirigo and watch the talk that you gave. I believe that was TEDxDirigo?
Sarah: Yes, exactly.
Lisa: I really appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me. One of the things that we talk about often on Love Main Radio is how to create really sustainability within the community so that people who want to stay here and have jobs and love the jobs they have and live in Maine forever and ever and ever and raise their kids here, they can. To hear that you have a job that you love, being a law professor and working on sustainable issues is very gratifying to me.
Sarah: Thanks. It’s gratifying to me, too. I feel very lucky.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Sarah Schindler, who is a professor at Maine Law, who has been earning a national reputation for her scholarship. Good luck with your future. It seems like you’ve done a lot of hard work so far, and I suspect there’s a lot more great stuff to come.
Sarah: Thank you so much.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 189, Sustainability Ed. Our guests have included Jay Friedlander and Sarah Schindler. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful 1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you’ve heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Sustainability Ed show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.