David Barnhizer is Professor of Law Emeritus at the Cleveland State University. He received law degrees from the Ohio State University where he graduated summa cum laude and from Harvard University where he was a Ford Foundation Urban Law Fellow, a CLEPR Clinical Teaching Fellow, and earned a Masters of Law degree. He began his legal career in Colorado with the Legal Services Office of El Paso County. While working in the Legal Services program representing lower income and minority clients, he also was an Adjunct at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, teaching an “Economics of Poverty” course dealing with the impact of economic systems and the lack of opportunities for many Blacks and Latinos.
In addition to serving as Director of the Clinical Law program at the Cleveland State University he was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London's Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, a Visiting Professor at the Westminster University School of Law in London, taught human rights and international environmental law in St. Petersburg, Russia, and instructed in Harvard’s Intersession program in Trial Advocacy.
He was a Senior Fellow with Earth Summit Watch, and a board member of the International Shrimp Action Network (ISANET), an international NGO network made up of more than twenty NGOs from the US, Africa, Europe and Asia involved in the human and other impacts of environment, development, and coastal zone management related to large scale shrimp aquaculture in developing countries. He was the Special International Consultant with the Mongolian government’s Ministry on Sustainable Development, assisting in the design of that nation’s sustainable development strategy.
He was Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Year 2000 Committee, chaired by Russell Train, head of World Wildlife Fund US and the second Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. He has consulted extensively with environmental and development organizationsHe spent nine years as a member of the board of directors for Performance Capital Management, was General Counsel for a high tech development company, NanoLogix, and was a strategic consultant with Sovonics Solar Systems, a subsidiary of British Petroleum.
He also served as Rapporteur for the Foresight Capability Workshop of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US House of Representatives, and has worked on projects in conjunction with numerous federal agencies including the Department of State, CEQ, Department of Energy, EPA, Congressional Research Service, and the Office of Technology Assessment.
During his time in Cleveland with Cleveland State University, he designed and conducted the training program for the area’s Public Defender’s Office, worked with lawyers with the Cleveland Legal Aid Society, and served as legal counsel for a Cleveland area Black-on-Black Anti-Crime Committee. He established and directed the second Street Law program in the US after Georgetown University. The Street Law project was an educational vehicle in which law students were trained to teach a range of legal knowledge to classes of high school students in the Cleveland public schools. The teaching program was conducted for more than a decade.
