This spring, GW Law presented Jason Hull, LLM '14, with the 2015 Jamie Grodsky Prize for Environmental Law Scholarship. Awarded each year for the best paper written by a JD, LLM, or SJD student in the field of environmental law, the prize commemorates the innovative environmental research of Professor Jamie Grodsky, who passed away in 2010.
The winning paper, "Hey Now, Let's be Social: The Social Cost of Carbon and the Case for Its Inclusion in the Government's Procurement of Electricity," argues that the social cost of carbon—an approximation of the monetized damages caused by climate change stemming from greenhouse gas emissions—should be applied to the federal government's procurement of electricity. It further presents three options for achieving that goal.
Mr. Hull submitted the paper last June as the thesis for his Government Procurement and Environmental Law LLM. He is currently a Major in the U.S. Air Force serving as an environmental attorney with the Air Force Legal Services Agency. He is the second military lawyer to receive the Grodsky prize and graduate from GW's Environmental LLM program.
The Grodsky Prize is funded by a generous gift from Professor Jamie Grodsky's father, Dr. Gerold Grodsky, and memorial gifts from her friends on the faculty. Dr. Grodsky and Jamie's sister, Andrea Huber, joined Mr. Hull and the Environmental Law Program for the award ceremony.