Dana Lake ‘23
Production Editor
While eager students have months left to wait until Fall 2021 course selection, an insider with Student Records has let at least one shake-up slip: Professor Jonathon Cannon will be making the switch from Environmental Law to Corporations, citing the need to feel validated by his work.
Professor Cannon, former general counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency, has spent his career advocating for responsible land management and climate change initiatives. His 2015 book “Environment in the Balance” (which has five stars on Amazon) analyzes how Supreme Court decisions in environmental cases have changed along with the Court’s priorities—from receptive and active in the 1960s to the more skeptical Court we see today. His life-long commitment to environmental issues earned him the position of UVA Law’s Blaine T. Phillips Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, but also made him the top choice for inaugural director of the Program in Law, Communities, and the Environment (PLACE). And now, finally, after twenty-three years teaching environmental courses at the Law School, Professor Cannon is ready to focus on work he can find personally fulfilling.
The business organization and finance concentration offered by UVA Law is a neglected, underfunded segment of the Law School. An anonymous professor teaching Corporate Finance was recently heard lamenting just how few law students know how to do math. “It’s a forgotten art,” he informed our reporter. “Students these days just don’t care about making money anymore.” The statistics back this up: of the T-14s, UVA Law sends the fewest students into Big Law. “If I wanted the Law School’s support and performative social media posts, I would be teaching Criminal Adjudication, not Mergers and Acquisitions,” another professor commented. “I don’t teach business law for the glory; I do it for the love of the American corporate structure.”
Our source in Student Records has heard Professor Cannon shares the same drive as the few brave professors who have stepped forward to teach business law classes. While there are fortunes left to be made in non-profit environmental work, Professor Cannon is finally ready to close the door on public service. “He’s been wanting to find work that has real meaning to it,” our source explained. After sharing many post-class kombuchas with Professor Cannon, this source felt confident enough to reveal his real thoughts on environmental law: “The environment is so overdone. Climate change is a hoax, anyway. He’s tired of fighting for sustainability when it’s been proven the earth is just too big for humans to have a real impact on its natural resources. America just doesn’t need more environmental lawyers, especially not when business law is so underrepresented.”
We are proud to announce that next Fall, Professor Cannon will be following his true passion: teaching Corporations. As one of the Law School’s least popular classes, Corporations has only three offerings in the Fall with sixty student slots each. Although business law is unlikely to bring him the money and prestige of environmental law, we here at Law Weekly fully support Professor Cannon in his pursuit of true fulfillment and validation.
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