Amy Laura Cahn L’09

Amy Laura Cahn (she/they) is the Legal Director for Taproot Earth. A community-based movement lawyer with over twenty-five years as an organizer and facilitator. Amy Laura collaborates on environmental, climate, land, and food justice to support self-determination and shifting power.

Prior to joining Taproot, Amy Laura was a Visiting Professor and Director of the Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Before VLGS, Amy Laura led the environmental justice and community lawyering practices at the Conservation Law Foundation and Philadelphia’s Public Interest Law Center, where she began as a Skadden Fellow and director of the Garden Justice Legal Initiative, the nation’s first urban agriculture law clinic. Amy Laura clerked for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division.

Amy Laura is also an adjunct lecturer at Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where she recently finished teaching the first Just Transition Law and Lawyering seminar. She received her BA, summa cum laude, from Hunter College and JD, magna cum laude, from Penn Carey Law. Amy Laura is a queer white Ashkenazi Jewish femme living with her partner and pups on Mashpee Wampanoag territory in her home state of Massachusetts.