Lawrence J. Kahn

Lawrence Kahn is an attorney, entrepreneur and educator who has provided advisory services in the environmental and maritime “trees and seas” space for over 25 years. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow with the Tulane Center for Environmental Law.

Mr. Kahn previously worked for the U.S. Army, where he was certified as a Contracting Officer’s Representative and negotiated and enforced government contracts and had oversight of the hazard tree removal program, management of Army timber, flora and fauna resources, protection of Army air, water and land resources, and development of environmental remediation projects and hazard tree programs for the (then) Division of Land Management.  

Following law school, Mr. Kahn served as Staff Attorney for the Seamen’s Church Institute’s Center for Seafarers’ Rights before going into private practice, joining the New York-based Freehill Hogan & Mahar, where he became partner in 2007. In 2013, Kahn left the firm to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities, including both a tree company and a recycling company. Kahn served as an officer, director, and general counsel and brought the recycling company international renown when he led the successful effort to have it become the first non-EU company qualified under the EU’s Ship Recycling Regulations.  

Kahn developed (and currently serves as Director of) the Tulane Utility Vegetation Management Initiative, a joint project of Tulane Law School’s Center for Environmental Law and Tulane Law School’s Center for Energy Law.  Through that initiative, he is involved in training a select group of Tulane Law School students in utility vegetation management law, practice and procedure and developed with those students the first comprehensive study of all UVM laws throughout North America.

He is a graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. in ancient studies.  He received his J.D. from Tulane Law School in 1995. He has advised numerous companies and appeared as an expert on CNN World News, NBC’s Dateline, and other television news programs, as well as in a variety of trade publications, including Tradewinds, Lloyd’s List, and The Journal of Commerce.  He was a featured speaker on recycling at the Tradewinds Conference held at Singapore in January 2017, and was a featured speaker on safe and green recycling at Ethical Corporation’s Responsible Business Summit in 2018.  He was a member of the faculty of the Admiralty Law Institute at its biennial meeting in March 2020 and the paper he delivered there has been published in the Tulane Maritime Law Journal.