Tseming Yang

Having been born in Taiwan, spent the majority of his childhood in Germany, and lived in Texas gives Professor Tseming Yang a unique perspective. "If you want to do global work, you need to know how different societies function," he said. Because he is connected to many places and cultures, Professor Yang is attuned to cultural differences and similarities and how people make assumptions about other cultures.

It is not the differences, but the ways in which divergent groups can, and must, function together that keeps his attention. After receiving his degree in biochemistry from Harvard University he felt some pressure to become a medical researcher, like his father, or a doctor. He did consider those areas, but the experiences he had running a summer camp and starting an after-school program in Boston’s Chinatown again broadened his perspective.

He found himself leaning toward civil rights and becoming concerned with social justice, racial equality, and how environmental regulation has affected low-income groups around world. "I looked around and realized that public affairs lawyers had great skills for making a difference."

Professor Yang graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall and soon after became an Attorney at the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources in Washington, DC. He saw the greater context of the cases he managed as justice for people and their relationship to the environment and not just the environment itself.

As a Fulbright scholar, he taught American tort law and international environmental law at Tsinghua University Law School in Beijing, China. Then in 2006 he helped forge a partnership for environmental law between Vermont Law School and Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) with a goal of helping address China's pollution and natural resource management problems.

His students give evidence of the larger impact of this work. "One essential difference I see here is the support we have to go out of our way to bridge the distance between student and teacher," he said. The intimacy of Vermont Law School nourishes relationships. That so many VLS graduates go on to public-interest work is a credit to the school for maintaining the idealism so many students lose along the way. "There is a place for environmental law and international law. Our mission is not to narrow public interest work but to extend it."