Environmental law occupies a space where science, public policy, and legal precedent converge — and where the stakes for communities and individuals are often highest. For most attorneys who practice in this space, the entry point is the law itself: statutes, regulations, case law. For Noam Glick, the entry point was the underlying policy architecture. That distinction shapes how he thinks about advocacy, and why his background sets him apart from practitioners who arrived at environmental issues through legal channels alone.
An Unusual Academic Foundation
Noam Glick did not begin his professional life as an attorney. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics and environmental studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz — a pairing that reflects an early interest in the relationship between human systems and natural ones. From there, he pursued a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Michigan, one of the country’s most rigorous graduate programs in public affairs.
Between those academic credentials and law school, Noam Glick worked as an environmental policy consultant in Washington, D.C. That experience placed him inside the machinery of federal environmental governance — where regulations are drafted, contested, lobbied against, and ultimately enforced. It is a perspective that practicing attorneys rarely carry.
By the time Noam Glick enrolled at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles on a full-ride scholarship, he had already spent years working at the intersection of environmental policy and institutional decision-making. He graduated cum laude in the top 10% of his class in 2007, served as an editor of the Loyola Law Review, and went on to clerk for the Honorable Gary Klausner of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
Why Policy Literacy Matters in Environmental Advocacy
Environmental statutes are rarely self-executing. Regulations issued under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and California’s own environmental framework each carry histories of legislative intent, agency rulemaking, and judicial interpretation. An attorney who understands only the resulting doctrine — without understanding how that doctrine was constructed — operates with a narrower toolkit.
Noam Glick’s training in public policy is not an academic footnote. It is a functional advantage. Understanding why a regulatory framework was designed the way it was helps an advocate identify where it has been applied correctly, where it has been stretched beyond its purpose, and where individuals and communities have legitimate claims that institutions have failed to honor.
His work as an environmental policy consultant in Washington, D.C., gave him direct exposure to how agencies translate legislative mandates into enforcement priorities — and, critically, where enforcement gaps tend to appear.
Environmental Protection as a Rights Issue
The connection between environmental protection and individual rights is often underappreciated in legal discourse. Clean air, clean water, and safe land are not abstract public goods — they are conditions that directly affect the health, safety, and economic stability of real people. When those conditions are compromised by institutional failures or unlawful conduct, the harm falls disproportionately on communities with limited resources and limited legal access.
Noam Glick’s broader advocacy work — representing employees, advancing workers’ rights, and engaging in consumer protection — reflects a consistent orientation toward individuals navigating systems that were not designed in their favor. Environmental protection fits naturally within that framework. The structural dynamics are the same: a power imbalance, an information gap, and legal remedies that exist in statute but are not always practically accessible.
The Federal Clerkship and Its Lasting Influence
After graduating from Loyola Law School, Noam Glick completed a federal clerkship with the Honorable Gary Klausner of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Federal clerkships are among the most selective legal positions available to recent law graduates, and the experience they provide — exposure to high-stakes federal litigation across multiple areas of law, including environmental and regulatory matters — is difficult to replicate in any other context.
For an attorney whose academic background already included environmental policy and economics, that clerkship provided direct exposure to how environmental disputes are evaluated at the federal level. The analytical rigor demanded by a federal judge — in both written work product and oral argument — carries into practice long after the clerkship ends.
From Consultant to Advocate: A Coherent Arc
Noam Glick’s career is often described through the lens of his transition from defense-side employment attorney to employee advocate. That transition is significant and genuine. But it is worth understanding the broader arc: a career that has consistently been oriented toward systems that affect individuals, and toward the legal and policy mechanisms that either protect or fail those individuals.
His work as an environmental policy consultant, his graduate training in public policy, his undergraduate study of environmental economics, his legal education, his federal clerkship, and his current practice representing employees and advancing workers’ rights are not disconnected chapters. They reflect a coherent set of commitments that have expressed themselves differently at different stages — but have pointed in the same direction throughout.
Connecting Environmental and Employment Advocacy
For workers in industries with significant environmental exposure — agriculture, construction, manufacturing, chemical processing — environmental and employment concerns frequently intersect. Unsafe working conditions, inadequate environmental protections, and violations of workers’ rights often arise from the same institutional failures: the prioritization of cost over compliance, the suppression of internal complaints, and the exploitation of workers who fear retaliation for raising concerns.
An attorney with Noam Glick’s combined background in environmental policy and employment law is positioned to understand those cases in ways that a narrower practitioner cannot. The overlaps are real, and the legal frameworks — while distinct — can reinforce one another when applied by someone who understands both.
About Noam Glick
Noam Glick is the founder of Glick Law Group, a Los Angeles-based law firm that represents employees exclusively. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics and environmental studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Michigan. Noam Glick graduated cum laude in the top 10% of his class from Loyola Law School in 2007 on a full-ride scholarship, where he served as an editor of the Loyola Law Review. He subsequently clerked for the Honorable Gary Klausner of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. After years defending large corporations at prominent U.S. law firms, Noam Glick founded Glick Law Group in 2014 to represent workers in employment law matters. Noam Glick and his wife support their community through their private foundation.