Remedies for Environmental Racism: A View from the Field

Authors

Luke W. Cole, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation

Abstract

The Michigan Law Review's recent Note, Remedying Environmental Racism, is an important and timely analysis of a civil rights law-based approach to environmental justice work - one of the first to emerge from legal academia. It correctly points out the high hurdles that toxic racism's victims must overcome to successfully pursue such a strategy. Godsil's piece will hopefully spur more academic and on-the-ground work in this nascent legal field, which I call "environmental poverty law" - that is, representing low-income communities (often, in this field, communities of color) facing environmental hazards. As a practitioner of environmental poverty law who has used civil rights law to fight a toxic waste incinerator, I want to offer a view from outside the academy on several of Godsil's points.

Recommended Citation

Luke W. Cole, Remedies for Environmental Racism: A View from the Field, 90 Mich. L. Rev. 1991 (1992).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol90/iss7/5