Sean Hecht serves as the managing attorney of Earthjustice’s California Regional Office. Based out of the organization’s Los Angeles office, Sean oversees the California Regional Office’s work fighting for the rights of all to a healthy environment regardless of where in the state they live, to transition California to an equitable zero-emissions future where cars, trucks, buildings, and power plants run on clean energy, not fossil fuels, and to protect the state’s magnificent natural spaces and biodiversity.

Sean came to Earthjustice after two decades on the faculty of UCLA School of Law, where he served most recently as the co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and co-director of the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic. At UCLA, he co-directed the Emmett Institute’s research and teaching programs, taught courses in multiple subfields of environmental and natural resources law and policy, supervised students and young attorneys in clinical advocacy work, and published influential scholarship on the relationship between climate change and the insurance sector, coastal governance, and other topics. He has been called on as an expert source for print and broadcast media, and a radio, podcast, and conference speaker, on a range of environmental issues.

After growing up in southern California, Sean attended Yale University and the University of Michigan Law School. Earlier in his career, Sean served as a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, as an attorney in private practice at a small firm, and as a judicial law clerk for Hon. Laughlin E. Waters (Central District of California).