Welcome to The Burl

Greetings! I’m Christophe Courchesne, a law professor, program director, and attorney-advocate at Vermont Law and Graduate School (VLGS). You’ve found your way to The Burl, a newsletter and website to share my academic work, including news from my programs, reactions to major developments in environmental law, scholarship, and other ideas about future directions for the field.

I am a New Englander. I grew up in Massachusetts, where I also went to college, law school, clerked, and practiced for much of my legal career. I have spent weeks most summers of my life on outer Cape Cod and on lakes in central Maine. I live in New Hampshire with my extraordinary wife Dr. Sarah Courchesne, where we both went to high school and later raised our two sons. And I have called Vermont my professional home since 2022.

I have been an environmental lawyer for more than twenty years, and I am now several years into the truly wonderful world of clinical teaching. I co-direct VLGS’s Environmental Advocacy Clinic, which empowers law students to take on important public-interest environmental litigation. I also am a tenure-track law professor and a law school associate dean overseeing VLGS’s environmental and experiential programs. That role includes the great honor of serving as the faculty director of the Environmental Law Center, the school’s renowned hub for our expansive environmental law curriculum, our annual calendar of special events and programs, and our many affiliated centers, institutes, and clinics.

Why ”The Burl”? Burl is a botanic term for a distinctive outgrowth or protuberance of a tree, formed in reaction to stress, damage, infection, or other trauma. In the lingo of tree biologists, a burl is “the result of hyperplasia, a greatly abnormal proliferation of xylem production by the vascular cambium.” In other words, a site of unusual, protective, and generative response to disruption.

For those of us in environmental law, we are living through a long era of disruption and volatility. We are in the midst of a sustained attack on the foundational laws and policy goals of the 1970s, which not coincidentally emerged in the same years as VLGS and its first environmental programs. And so a burl struck me as an apt metaphor and aspiration for my academic work here in the woods of northern New England—with students, colleagues, and on my own part—a vigorous and potentially-strange redirection to meet the moment’s grievous environmental and democratic crises.

Please accept this as an invitation to engage with me, my work, my institution, and our students. Subscribe to this newsletter and to the newsletter of the Environmental Law Center. I welcome your feedback, ideas, suggestions, and opportunities for collaboration. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or email me directly at ccourchesne at vermontlaw.edu.

The cover image is The Old Oak, Jules Dupré (c. 1870), from the National Gallery of Art.