James Thornton

James Thornton

James is the founding CEO of ClientEarth. He is an environmental lawyer and social entrepreneur. He moved from a Wall Street law practice to found the Citizens’ Enforcement Project at NRDC in New York, where he brought some 80 federal lawsuits against corporations to enforce the Clean Water Act. In 2007, James founded ClientEarth—Europe’s first public interest environmental law organization, with offices across Europe and in Beijing. In 2017, James co-authored Client Earth with his husband Martin Goodman, a book that tells the story of using law to save the environment from California to Africa, Europe to China. He graduated from Yale, and is also the author of a book on spiritual practice, A Field Guide to the Soul, an environmental legal thriller, Immediate Harm, an environmental scifi novel, Sphinx, and a volume of poetry on science and environment, The Feynman Challenge.