Steve Kass

Stephen L. Kass is Senior Environmental Counsel at Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP in New York. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Yale in 1961 and his LL.B. cum laude from Harvard in 1964. After completing a study of urban planning in Mexico City, he practiced law as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York and then founded and served as Executive Director of Community Law Offices in East Harlem before becoming a founding partner of Berle, Kass & Case, a firm specializing in environmental law from the field’s inception in the 1970s.

In 1994 he founded and has since helped direct Carter Ledyard & Milburn’s Environmental Practice Group, where he has served as lead counsel in numerous cases involving the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and their New York counterparts.

Steve is an Adjunct Professor at Brooklyn Law School and at NYU’s Center on Global Affairs, where he teaches courses on international environmental law, climate change and human rights and, most recently, business and human rights. In addition to other writings, he has written a regular column on “Environmental Law” and “International Environmental Law” for the New York Law Journal since 1986.

Steve is a past Vice-President of the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired, among other things, its Council on International Affairs, Committee on International Human Rights, Committee on International Environmental Law and its Task Force on Climate Adaptation. He is an emeritus director of Human Rights Watch (where he formerly chaired its Policy Committee), a member (and past chair) of the board of directors of the National Center for Law & Economic Justice and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.