2 Trial Lawyer • Fall 2023 By Rob Kline OTLA Guardian My political awakening occurred at age 14. I grew up in a suburb of New York City and was hanging out after school at a friend’s house. My friend showed me a Time magazine with a cover story about the breaking news that President Ronald Reagan had secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to support the Contras, a rightwing, anti-communist, terrorist group battling the communist Sandinista government. Much of the funding for the Contras came from sales of cocaine. The CIA provided funding, training, equipment and target lists to the Contras that were used in torture and assassinations. There were color photographs of dead bodies in the jungle. The images are still etched in my mind. I was shocked that our government was directly involved in the murder of citizens in another country. Not longer after that, I learned about apartheid in South Africa, a system of state-sponsored racial segregation in which non-white citizens were deprived of political and civil rights, and subjected to human rights abuses. I had trouble reconciling the privileges we enjoyed like good public schools in our picturesque small town with the harms the United States government was doing, or was at least complicit in, overseas. My emerging sense of politics was decidedly Where I came from, what you can do left of center and it made me something of a black sheep in a Republican family with deep Texas roots. I developed a penchant for challenging assumptions, and sometimes authority, when I saw people who were less fortunate being dominated or exploited by those with power. Looking back, this was when I first started considering a career in law. I majored in political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I was particularly interested in subjects like how the United States and other western countries exerted their influence and power over lesser developed countries. I enjoyed learning about macroeconomics and how institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank made loans in Africa that came with conditions that only benefited the sponsors of these loans and guaranteed the indentured servitude of the recipients for years to come. I was kind of a serious kid. After college, I moved to Washington, D.C., figuring it was the best place to put a political science degree to use. After an internship on Capitol Hill, I landed at Thompson Publishing Group on K Street. I started as a reporter and over the course of four years worked my way up to managing editor where I edited trade journals that covered federal environmental programs including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and programs covering hazardous waste. I developed sources on the Hill, at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and in a variety of groups that sought to influence the development of environmental policy in our nation’s capitol. The perfect match My interest in environmental law dovetailed nicely with a love of the outdoors born from completing an Outward Bound trip as a teen, and four years of skiing and mountain biking in the Rockies during college. As I mentioned, I had an inkling I would go to law school ever since that political awakening at age 14. After four years of writing about environmental law from the sidelines, I decided it was time to go to law school and be a participant. Looking back, my desire to help preserve the natural resources of the planet was another application of wanting to protect the weak from the strong — here, the environment, which couldn’t speak for itself. I spent my first year at Vermont Law School, attracted by its top-rated environmental law program. Unfortunately, I learned that I didn’t love administrative law where the day-to-day work involved challenging agency decisions on a closed, cold record. I transferred to the University of Oregon School of Law where I got my law degree. After passing the bar, I moved to Portland where I externed for U.S. Magistrate Judge John Jelderks. I then spent five years doing insurance defense and working at a large regional firm doing President’s Message Rob Kline
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