Jon Hinck is an American environmentalist, lawyer and politician. He is currently of counsel to Fitzgerald Law Group, a plaintiffs’ mass tort firm in Portland, Maine. With a background in public service, Jon served three terms in the Maine House of Representatives where he co-chaired the Joint Committee on Energy & Utilities. He also served one term on the Portland City Council. Previously, Jon was the Acting Attorney General for the Republic of Palau and where he successfully litigated cases that enabled the Pacific island state to gain its sovereignty in 1994. He first practiced law first in California where, as an associate with Lieff, Cabraser & Heimann, he represented fishers and native villagers as plaintiffs’ class counsel in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case. As part of his legal work, Jon filed the first statewide and later multistate lawsuits against oil companies for MTBE groundwater contamination. He has litigated mass tort cases arising from defective drugs such as Baycol, Fleet Phospho-Soda, Levaquin and Trovan. Jon also worked as Staff Attorney with the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Maine’s leading environmental advocacy group, where he promoted renewable energy and worked to control mercury pollution and other toxics. In 2004, he led the successful effort to enact Maine’s first-in-the-nation manufacturer responsibility electronic waste law.
With expertise in policy analysis, issue advocacy, politics, government and nonprofit administration, Jon has worked at local, state, national and international levels to advocate for critical environmental and social issues. In 1979, Jon co-founded Greenpeace USA and later led the worldwide program for Greenpeace International and played key roles in many successful campaigns. He served as an NGO delegate to the 1997 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto. He served on the advisory board of the U.S. Congress’s Office of Technology’ Assessment on Wastes in Marine Environments. He is the author of The Republic of Palau and the United States: Self-determination Becomes the Price of Free Association, 78 Cal. L. Rev. 915 (1990) and numerous articles and op-eds in popular press. He is currently a member of the two national non-profit boards: Greenpeace, Inc. and Upstream. Jon holds degrees from Cal Berkeley Law and the University of Pennsylvania.
