The Civil Rights Act and Environmental Justice

Noah Hall's excellent Great Lakes Law blog featured a guest post by Chris Winter of the Crag Law Center  in Portland, OR.

Here is Noah's introduction:

This guest post is by Chris Winter, Co-Executive Director & Staff Attorney of the Crag Law Center in Portland, Oregon.  Chris and I went to law school together, and despite his Pittsburgh roots, he moved out west after graduation.  After several years in private practice with Stoel Rives LLP, Chris founded the Crag Law Center to provide affordable legal assistance to groups working on environmental and natural resource issues.  Chris had a huge victory this week in a precedent setting environmental justice case under the Civil Rights Act.  The case received national coverage (see this article from the New York Times) and will put legal and political pressure on the Obama Administration’s EPA to finally enforce the law to protect poor and minority communities from pollution and other environmental harm.

Read Chris' post. It's a great story, and I suspect we'll see more like this.

"What the district court initially classified as an 'isolated instance of untimeliness' has since bloomed into a consistent pattern of delay by the EPA." -- Judge A. Wallace Tashima, writing for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals