EUGENE–The University of Oregon’s first graduating class of the new millennium will celebrate its achievement on Sunday, May 21, when the UO School of Law celebrates spring commencement.

The UO law school ceremony, honoring approximately 160 graduates and open to the public, will begin at 1 p.m. in the Silva Concert Hall at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts, One Eugene Centre. A reception will follow in the Wayne Morse Commons of the university’s William W. Knight Law Center, 1515 Agate St.

Luke Cole, director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation’s Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, and a visiting professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, will deliver the keynote address to this historic class during the commencement ceremonies. The law school’s graduating class selected Cole as this year’s commencement speaker.

The ceremony will include an address by Paul Wagner, president of the Law Student Bar Association. Also speaking will be Doug Hughes, who was selected by the third-year student body as the graduating class speaker, and Maurice Holland, UO professor of law.

Senior U.S. District Judge Helen J. Frye, a 1966 graduate of the UO School of Law, will receive the 2000 Meritorious Service Award during the ceremony. President Jimmy Carter nominated Frye, 69, a native of Klamath Falls, for the position of U.S. district judge in November 1979. Previously, she served as a Lane County Circuit Court judge, worked in private law practice and was a public school teacher.

As director of the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, Cole represents low-income communities working to solve environmental problems. His work focuses on organizing, administrative advocacy, litigation and legislation.

Cole has worked with dozens of community groups in local struggles around California, from the Mexican to the Oregon borders. Through the center, he also provides legal and technical assistance to attorneys and community groups involved in environmental justice struggles nationwide.

Cole is on a six-month sabbatical from the center and is teaching environmental law as a visiting professor at Hastings College of the Law.

Previously, Cole worked for six years as general counsel for the center and for two years as its staff attorney. He has taught seminars on environmental justice as an adjunct professor at Stanford Law School and at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, as well as at Hastings.

Cole serves on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), chairing the council’s Enforcement Subcommittee as well as its Title VI Task Force. He is the co-founder, editor and publisher of the quarterly journal Race, Poverty & the Environment, now in its eighth year of publication. Widely published, his articles have appeared in the Ecology Law Quarterly, the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, the Fordham Urban Law Journal and the Michigan Law Review.

Among his many awards and honors, Cole was named by "The American Lawyer" in 1997 as one of "forty-five young lawyers outside the private sector whose vision and commitment are changing lives." He received the Ecology Law Quarterly’s 1997 Environmental Leadership Award for "outstanding contributions to the development of environmental law and policy"; the 1994 Award of Merit from California Communities Against Toxins; and in 1992 was recognized by the American Bar Association’s "Barrister" magazine as one of "20 Young Lawyers Making a Difference."

Cole received his juris doctorate degree from Harvard Law School in 1989 and his bachelor of arts degree from Stanford University in 1984.

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