[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_4″ last=”no” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ class=”” id=””][fusion_imageframe lightbox=”no” lightbox_image=”” style_type=”none” hover_type=”none” bordercolor=”” bordersize=”0px” borderradius=”0″ stylecolor=”” align=”none” link=”” linktarget=”_self” animation_type=”0″ animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″ hide_on_mobile=”no” class=”” id=””] 
[/fusion_imageframe][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”3_4″ last=”yes” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ class=”” id=””][fusion_text]By Janet Elliott
HOUSTON (Oct. 20) – As a young Vinson & Elkins associate in Houston in the early 1970s, Carol Dinkins had to take an out-of-town client through the kitchen of an exclusive Houston club to reach a private room because women were not allowed in the main dining area at lunch.
A number of years later, Dinkins again would find herself entering an establishment through the kitchen. But this time she was in a formal dress and headed for the dais with President Reagan, who had appointed her to a high-ranking position in the Justice Department.
“That was the first I’d known of going though the kitchen as a dignitary,” Dinkins says. “Before I had to go through the kitchen because I was a woman.”
Dinkins has blazed many trails in her 44-year career. She was one of the first lawyers in Texas to develop a specialty in environmental law. Vinson & Elkins voted in 1979 to make Dinkins the first woman to make partner at a major Houston law firm.
In 1984, President Reagan appointed her as deputy attorney general. She was the first woman to become second in command at Justice.
In separate interviews, senior executives at Shell Oil and BP – two oil and gas companies that have relied on Dinkins legal advice over the years – describe Dinkins as probably the “best environmental lawyer ever.”
As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010, “The first call BP executives made when they learned of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill was to their long-time legal adviser Carol Dinkins.”
It all started with Dinkins’ interest in the emerging specialty of environmental law.
Dinkins did not study environmental law at the University of Houston because no classes were offered before she graduated in 1971. Over the next two years – immersed in a coastal and marine program at the law school – she watched with great interest as Congress passed major waterway safety, marine life protection and clean water acts.
“All kinds of environmental law was passed very shortly after I got out of law school,” Dinkins says. “The research and writing and teaching program I went into really gave me an immediate immersion into the development of environmental law in the 1970s.”
A tip from a former classmate whose husband worked at Vinson & Elkins helped Dinkins become the fourth woman lawyer hired at the Houston firm and the first to demand to be placed on the partner track. The other two lawyers in the public law section handled air and water issues and everything else fell to Dinkins.
In her very first week, she found herself working on coastal zone permitting projects for Texas business giants George Mitchell and Perry Bass.
“Those were remarkable opportunities for a brand new lawyer,” Dinkins says. “The firm was totally supportive and very eager to turn such big matters over to me.”
Reagan’s election in 1980 presented another serendipitous opportunity for Dinkins, a Republican since childhood when her parents were among a handful of GOP faithful in South Texas. Backed with support from Bass, Gov. Bill Clements and former Gov. John Connally, Dinkins impressed the new administration with her expertise.
“They hadn’t had anyone with my level of experience in environmental law. Also, they didn’t have very many women candidates,” Dinkins says.
She served as assistant attorney general in charge of the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1981 to 1983. It was an exciting time to run the division, which was in the process of developing criminal sanctions for polluters.
In 1984, after happily reviving her practice, Dinkins was asked to return to Washington as deputy attorney general, second in rank to Attorney General William French Smith.
“Everybody said you can’t pass this up,” says Dinkins. “They were right, and I’m glad I didn’t because it was another great, mind-blowing experience.”
Dinkins served in that position for a year, broadening her experience through work on immigration, federal prisons and drug enforcement.
Since leaving the Washington pressure cooker 30 years ago, Dinkins has handled many complicated, precedent-setting cases. She spent a year negotiating a 300-page consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department to remediate 60 sites in a dozen states where soil within the right-of-way of an interstate natural gas pipeline had been contaminated with PCBs and other substances.
“Nobody had ever done a linear cleanup project like that,” says Dinkins. “The project came in early and under budget.”
She also recalls the day she resolved two federal plea agreements for the same client involving environmental disasters 3,000 miles apart – a large Alaskan oil spill and a deadly explosion at a Texas oil refinery.
As Dinkins, 69, winds down her practice this year, she notes how the legal profession and the practice of environmental law has changed profoundly. There is now competition from law firms around the country. Consultants and in-house legal departments have taken over much of the permitting work.
Her pride of being a trailblazer for other women is tempered with the knowledge that too often she is still the only woman in a room of a dozen people, whether it is a law firm conference room or the board room of a Fortune 500 company.
“It’s still not as common or frequent as I would have hoped for at this point in the world,” she says. “Someday, I hope it will be different.”[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]