Boston College Law School Professor Zygmunt Plater is to receive the American Bar Association SEER Award for Excellence in Environmental, Energy, and Resources Stewardship. The award will be bestowed at the 27th SEER Fall Conference in Boston Sept. 11-14.
The ABA Section Excellence in Environmental, Energy, and Resources recognizes and honors individuals, entities, or organizations that have made significant accomplishments or demonstrated recognized leadership in the environment, energy, and natural resources legal area.
Plater teaches and researches in the areas of environmental, property, land use, and administrative agency law. Over the past 30 years he has been involved with a number of issues of environmental protection and land use regulation, including service as petitioner and lead counsel in the extended endangered species litigation over the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam, representing the endangered snail darter, farmers, Cherokee Indians, and environmentalists in the Supreme Court of the United States, federal agencies, and congressional hearings.
His book The Snail Darter and the Dam— the story of a small endangered fish’s travels through the corridors of American Power— is published by Yale University Press and being made into a documentary film series. He was chairman of the State of Alaska Oil Spill Commission’s Legal Task Force over a two-year period after the wreck of the M/V Exxon-Valdez.
Plater was a consultant to plaintiffs in the Woburn toxic litigation, Anderson et al. v. W.R. Grace et al., the subject of the book and movie A Civil Action. Drawing upon his work for the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Commission he researched and consulted on responses to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.