Environmental Justice

Eileen Gauna is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law, where she teaches Environmental Law, Environmental Justice, Administrative Law, Energy Law, and Property Law.

Professor Gauna has worked closely with grassroots environmental justice organizations and networks in the Southwestern United States. For example, she conducted workshops on the applicability of civil rights laws to environmental permitting for the SouthWest Organizing Project, Compadres, and Tucsonians for a Cleaner Environment. She has commented on several proposed agency regulations, highlighting the environmental justice implications of the proposed rules. She worked with Richard Moore, director of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ) and co-chair of the National Environmental Policy Commission (NEPC), in drafting a submission to the NEPC on a proposed legislative strategy to address environmental justice. She has worked with SNEEJ (and its affiliates) and Communities for a Better Environment to examine proposals to reform new source review and market-oriented proposals under the Clean Air Act, and is now working with a SNEEJ working group on environmental justice legislative and regulatory initiatives in New Mexico.

After receiving her J.D. from the University of New Mexico, she clerked for Justice Mary Walters of the New Mexico Supreme Court and subsequently practiced law in Albuquerque. Prior to joining the law faculty at UNM, she was on the faculty at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, California.

Professor Gauna is a member of the Environmental Justice Committee of the American Bar Association's Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section, as well as a member of the Environmental Justice Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section on Environment, Energy and Resources. In addition, Professor Gauna is currently on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) Implementation Committee, and recently testified before Congress on climate change issues. She has served several tenures on the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), where she served as chair of the Air and Water Subcommittee and member of the Executive Council. In connection with her duties on the NEJAC, Professor Gauna worked on the drafting committee which prepared the following reports to the Administrator: EPA Report: Environmental Justice in the Permitting Process (July 2000), and Report on Integration of Environmental Justice in Federal Agency Programs (December 2000). Professor Gauna is also a former chair of the Executive Committee of the Environmental Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools.

In 1998 Professor Gauna was appointed to an EPA federal advisory committee that examined the applicability of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to environmental permitting. In connection with her work on the advisory committee, Professor Gauna was a member of a workgroup that developed a template for state and local governments to use in addressing environmental justice, as well as a drafting workgroup that helped prepare the Report to the EPA Administrator of The Title VI Implementation Advisory Committee: Next Steps for EPA, State and Local Environmental Justice Programs (1999). In connection with her work on the Title VI advisory committee, Professor Gauna gave a presentation on the technical aspects of the then-proposed report to grassroots environmental justice representatives in Dallas, Texas.

In 2002, Professor Gauna was appointed to the California Governor's Office of Planning, Research and Development Environmental Justice Working Group, a multi-stakeholder group appointed to advise the Governor's Office on implementation of environmental justice legislation recently enacted in California. She has also given several presentations on environmental justice at workshops sponsored by the California Air Resources Board.

Her publications include RECHTSHAFFEN AND GAUNA, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: LAW, POLICY AND REGULATION (2002), a leading casebook on environmental justice, along with numerous reports, chapters and law review articles on environmental law and environmental justice.

Eileen Gauna
University of New Mexico School of Law
Albuquerque, NM 
505.277.7776
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Catherine A. O'Neill is an Adjunct Law Faculty Member and Environmental Scholar at Lewis and Clark Law School. She is a former Habitat Policy Analyst for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and former Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. She is a former member of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Professor O'Neill has taught, lectured, and written in the areas of environmental justice, environmental law, natural resources law, and property. Her work considers questions of risk and justice in environmental policy, focusing in particular on issues of environmental justice for Native peoples.

Professor O'Neill has worked on issues of environmental justice with various tribes, advisory committees, and grassroots environmental justice groups. Professor O'Neill was recently a member of the technical advisory board for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community's four-year study, "Bioaccumulative Toxics in Native Shellfish." Professor O'Neill served as consultant to the Forest County Potawatomi Community on environmental justice issues raised by a proposed mine in nearby Crandon, Wisconsin. In the fall of 2002, the tribe successfully concluded its decades-long efforts by purchasing, together with the Sokaogon/Mole Lake Band of Chippewa , the land including the proposed mine and withdrawing the permit application. Professor O'Neill worked extensively with the Fish Consumption Workgroup of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, first as a member of and then as consultant to the Workgroup. The Workgroup's investigation and deliberation over the course of two years culminated in the publication of a major report, Fish Consumption and Environmental Justice, which was transmitted along with recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002. While on the faculty at the University of Arizona, Professor O'Neill worked with Tucson's Environmental Justice Action Group, assisting the group on environmental justice issues raised by an air quality permit for beryllium and other emissions and a cleanup of TCE contamination.

Following her graduation from law school at the University of Chicago, Professor O'Neill was named a Ford Foundation Graduate Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School. As a fellow, Professor O'Neill studied issues of international environment and development policy. She then worked for the Washington State Department of Ecology as an Air Quality Planner and Air Toxics Coordinator. Her work there included researching the applicability of market-based approaches to air toxics regulation. Prior to joining the faculty at Seattle University, Professor O'Neill taught at the University of Washington and the University of Arizona.

Professor O'Neill has published numerous articles in the areas of environmental justice and environmental policy. These articles have been excerpted in casebooks, anthologies, and other collections on a diverse array of topics including environmental risk, economics and equity, environmental justice, Indian Law, and International Law. Professor O’Neill’s work has twice been selected by her peers for recognition in the Land Use and Environmental Law Review’s ten best articles of the year: for an article on debt-for-nature swaps, co-authored with Cass R. Sunstein, and, most recently, for an article on risk avoidance, entitled No Mud Pies: Risk Avoidance as Risk Regulation.  She also co-authored a chapter entitled, “The Mathematics of Mercury,” in Reforming Regulatory Impact Analysis, Resources for the Future Press, 2009, and her experience with mercury-emitting chlor-alkili plants led to her testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection in 2009.

Professor O'Neill has served on the board of the Washington Wilderness Coalition and has served as a peer reviewer for various journals, including Environmental Management, and Risk Analysis.

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Clifford Rechtschaffen is a former Member Scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform. 

He is Professor and Director of the Environmental Law Program at Golden Gate University School of Law, and is also Co-Director of Golden Gate's Environmental Law and Justice Clinic. Golden Gate's environmental law program has been ranked among the top 20 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in two of the past four years.   He is currently on academic leave, while serving as Special Assistant to the California Attorney General on Climate Change.

Professor Rechtschaffen co-founded in 1994 and co-directs Golden Gate's in-house Environmental Law and Justice Clinic, which provides direct representation to low-income communities and communities of color on environmental justice, public health, toxics, and air quality matters. The clinic has received awards from the American Bar Association, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Professor Rechtschaffen is an active member of the California League for Environmental Enforcement Now (CLEEN), which coordinates legislative, administrative, and litigation efforts on behalf of environmental groups engaged in Proposition 65 enforcements. (Proposition 65 is an anti-toxics initiative passed by California voters in 1986.)

Professor Rechtschaffen served from 1994 to 1997 as a member of the Advisory and Drafting Committees of Lead Safe California, a multi-stakeholder group convened to address the problem of lead-based paint poisoning. In that role he helped draft a comprehensive California lead-poisoning prevention statute, and testified in support of it to numerous stakeholder meetings and before the California legislature.

Professor Rechtschaffen helped draft legislation in 1999 requiring California to publish an annual state of the environment report (passed by the legislature but vetoed by Governor Gray Davis). He has advised the election campaigns of Governor Davis in 1998 and Attorney General Bill Lockyer in 1998 and 2002 on environmental issues. He has been an informal consultant to the California Attorney General's Office Task Force on Environmental Justice. He served as a consultant on environmental justice issues to the California Department of Health Services Electric and Magnetic Field Risk Evaluation project.

Professor Rechtschaffen is a volunteer mediator for environmental cases with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He serves on the Executive Committee of the California State Bar Environmental Law Section, which consists of approximately 2,500 attorneys in the state.

Prior to becoming a professor at Golden Gate, Professor Rechtschaffen worked for seven years in the Environment Section of the California Attorney General's Office. In that role he litigated cases involving the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, wetlands, air toxics, hazardous waste law, and state and federal Superfund laws. He was also one of three lawyers representing the state in defending and enforcing California's landmark right-to-know toxics initiative, Proposition 65. Professor Rechtschaffen also was a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer ("Reggie") Fellow with the Legal Aid Society of Marin County from 1985 to 1986, and a law clerk to Judge Thelton Henderson, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, from 1984 to 1985.

Before law school Professor Rechtschaffen served as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Donald Stewart (Alabama) from 1978 to 1980, with responsibility for housing, urban development, and related issues. Professor Rechtschaffen also worked as a program consultant for Rural America, a public interest and advocacy group representing low income residents in rural communities, and as a field liaison for Common Cause, working on sunshine in government and campaign financing issues.

Professor Rechtschaffen has published widely, including two recent books. The first, Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation (with Professor Eileen Gauna), is a comprehensive casebook about environmental justice, a significant and dynamic contemporary development in environmental law. The second, Reinventing Environmental Enforcement and the State/Federal relationship (with Dave Markell), explores the current debates about shifting environmental enforcement from a deterrence-based approach to one emphasizing cooperation, and devolving greater environmental enforcement authority to the states from the federal government.

Professor Rechtschaffen has testified before the California Legislature about the State's Superfund law and about a proposed Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act. He has helped organize numerous community and professional workshops about environmental justice. He also organized and conducted a training session about lead poisoning forCalifornia judges and court commissioners.

Clifford Rechtschaffen
Golden Gate University School of Law
San Francisco, CA 
515.442 6674
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On Academic Leave serving in the California Attorney General's office.