Wayne State University Law School Professor Nick Schroeck has been invited to participate in the final stage of a U.S. and Canadian project to assess the past and future of the St. Lawrence River Basin.

The Great Lakes Futures Project is a venture of the Transborder Research University Network for Water Stewardship, a partnership established in 2007 of 21 Canadian and U.S. research institutions, including Wayne State University.

Schroeck, a Bloomfield Township resident and a 2007 alumnus of Wayne Law, is director the law school's Transnational Environmental Law Clinic and executive director of the nonprofit Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.

The Great Lakes Futures Project, over the past two years, has analyzed the future that current environmental public policies are leading to and formulated recommendations to bring those policies closer to creating a desired state for the St. Lawrence River Basin, including its air and water quality. The recommendations and final analyses will be presented and discussed during a meeting Thursday, Oct. 3, and Friday, Oct. 4, in Buffalo, N.Y.

"I will be there to listen to and engage with that discussion," Schroeck said. "Then we will continue the discussion among a smaller group of legally oriented scholars in an effort to tease out, critique and hopefully build upon the findings. I will then be drafting a short memo analyzing some of the legal and governance implications of the Great Lakes Futures Project. The idea is that the discussion and memos will lay the foundation for a special issue of a journal or a dedicated book on the future of the Great Lakes' St. Lawrence River Basin, in which I will contribute an article. Using a rigorous scenario analysis methodology, this initiative engaged more than 30 faculty, 25 graduate students, representatives from non-governmental organizations and government officials from the United States and Canada."

Photo: Nick Schroeck