Press Releases

Press Releases

Memphis Law Student Takes First Place in TBA Writing Competition

Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Apr 19, 2010

Paper on 'environmental justice' wins fourth annual contest

NASHVILLE, April 19, 2010 — Nicholas C. Christiansen, a second-year student at The University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, has been awarded first place in the Tennessee Bar Association Environmental Law Section's 2010 Jon E. Hastings Memorial Award Writing Competition for his article "Environmental Justice: Finding a Private Right Of Action."

Christiansen will collect a cash award of $800 and his article will be published in the Environmental Law Section's newsletter. The second place award went to Eliot D. Kerner, a third-year law student at the University of Tennessee College of Law, for his article "Cooking' Up a Solution: Remediating Methamphetamine's Environmental Hazards in Tennessee."

The TBA Environmental Section sponsors the Jon E. Hastings Memorial Award Writing Competition each year to promote a dialogue on important environmental issues and to strengthen relationships among environmental law professors, environmental law students and environmental practitioners in the state. The competition is open to any law student member of the TBA and of the section. Entries are judged by a panel of environmental law practitioners, members of the judiciary and/or professors selected by the section. The competition is named for Jon E. Hastings, a founding member of the TBA Environmental Law Section. Hastings was an attorney with Boult, Cummings, Connors & Berry in Nashville who died at the young age of 45 after a two-year battle with cancer. Despite his health problems, Hastings found time and energy to devote to numerous philanthropic causes and civic groups, and contribute to the body of environmental law in the state.